Thunderstorms & Horns

We've been having lots of thunderstorms roll through the valley this past week. Last night I woke up to a rain that sounded like no other. You could hear the "plunk, plunk" of these HUGE raindrops hitting the roof. They were enormous!

Thunderstorms rolled through this afternoon and then again around 6 o'clock. Todd was standing right in front of me when there was a BRIGHT flash and IMMEDIATE "BOOM". Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a huge flash so I knew it was close. The sound was SO loud that we could both feel the power of the sound waves in our chests.

We ate dinner and then went outside to investigate where the lightening had hit. We first investigated the neighbour's house and yard... nothing. We checked the school chain link fence and the baseball diamond cage right behind the house... nothing. And then I heard him... "Ally! It's over here! I found the strike!" Todd stood on the school field and was pointing back towards the house at a tall tree less than 100 feet behind the house. Sure enough.... the tree had a whole chunk out of it. The strike had literally boiled the inner sap and had exploded the inside of the tree out wards. There were chunks of tree everywhere around it on the ground.

So scary that it was so close!!!

We ventured to do some errands in Fernie after dinner and were on the way home while traveling through Sparwood when there appeared a buck running across the road in front of us out of the blue....

SLAM!

We hit him head on with the Jeep! Yikes! So we stopped the Jeep and inspected the front. We only did minor damage to the front grill (cracked it right down the center) and we displaced the passenger side headlight a bit and broke one of the filaments in the light. Not too much damage considering we hit him hard and head on. I would imagine Todd will be looking into a new grill and headlight assembly this weekend. We left the young male buck in the ditch dead from the impact... poor thing.

I hope we have a better weekend...