nature's taking over my one track mind

A thunderstorm kept me from swimming yesterday. I hate missing a day in the pool. It feels like I'm not getting my money's worth. But the storm came through right after I awoke from my nap so there wasn't a lot I could do about it. I used to wonder why thunder and lightning meant that I couldn't swim. You would think that something tall like a tree or a house would get struck before something low like a pool. It turns out that lightning can get conducted into the pool by the various pipes and wires connected to it.

I had hoped that the rain would at least provide some free water for the pool. The recent heat wave has caused me to lose a lot to evaporation. Unfortunately, the storm put more leaves into the pool than water. Today my daughter was kind enough to stitch up a hole that had ripped open in the bag for our automatic pool cleaner. That saved me a lot of time.

For all my griping about the leaves, we fared much better than a family a couple of miles from here. A big tree in their front yard had the bark knocked right off it during last night's storm. They weren't hurt but they said some wires in their house burned. There were piles of Fiberglas insulation in their yard that were singed by the burning wires. Take a look at their naked tree: