Sicka Cicadas

Apparently the whole cicada thing in Tennessee is much bigger than we desert-bound folks can appreciate.  I enjoyed this video of the phenomenon.

The Microburst

We had our first thunderstorm here since last Fall.  Tuesday night, about 1 am, a storm moved through.  Unfortunately, we got about 0.07" of rain instead of the three or four we needed.  We did get the wind and damage.  Here's the big tree in front of my office.

Sorry about the rotation...no idea how to make the blog editor fix that.

Fortunately, nothing other than the tree itself was broken.  This makes me think of how much damage the Alabama storms did.  According to the weather folks, we had a microburst as one of the thunderstorms was breaking up.  It produced a wind gust of 84 mph.  That's less than half what the EF-4 twister did in Alabama.  Wow.

It's all about perspective.