Lightning Strikes

Lightning Strikes, originally uploaded by swamysk.

*I didn't take this picture. It's actually in Mumbai (fmr. Bombay), India.*

Last night I was getting some late night reading in when my bedroom window went electric blue with the photonic power of a nearby lightning bolt. My first thoughts were that this was some oddity of reflection. I knew that rain had been falling for a while, but I wasn't concerned.

Then it came. A shockwave of thunderous compressed, supercharged air assulted my house. At first the windows didn't rattle, the walls didn't creek and tremble. The noise was not stopping, five, ten, twenty, fourty seconds passed and still the sounds of shaking persisted. Had the frequency of this thunder matched the resonant frequency of my house? would the tremor accelerate, amplify, multiply... would it shake the house apart? was this really just a storm?

Thoughts started racing. Stealth bombing campaign that simulates lightning to "pinpoint" targets, an alien probe being deposited/recovered from earth, a late-night Cyclotron experiment gone terribly wrong. Who knows.

The house survived, and I'm pretty sure it was just a regular old electric storm.