Nucleus accumbens

About once a year, more often if I'm lucky, there's a decent thunderstorm of some size during summer. Today, tonight, was that day. Perhaps the only good thing about this tiny apartment is the view it offers from above all but the tallest trees and all the way towards the horizon of low and gently sloping mountains.

The curtains are moved aside as far as they go, all lights turned off except for one, and I sit right in front of the windows with a favorite beverage or two.

The barrage picks up and euphoria rises, the haze of falling rain is accentuated by the increasing distance of multiple local horizons it creates in the landscape.

As the clouds thicken lightning strikes constantly, every speck of sky --clouds and rain-- is drenched and blurred by patterns of rising and falling light.

Later the rain moves in for real. Cascading torrents of rain. Enough rain that I can make out the shadows of light from the windows in the apartment above as they're reflected in the rain, and then it gets even denser.

Suddenly in the curtains of falling water two ghostly blue seagulls swoop by to the sounds of thunder. They're neon blue, illuminated by the ad on the roof of the building, flying against a backdrop of almost pastel lilac clouds, clouds without any horizon only a gradient to solid black.

The rain lessens and the lightning picks up again, in the distance it makes a series of solid columns of light moving perhaps only a few hundred meters from source to target, this thunderstorm was flying unusually low.

I love lightning.

Update with some numbers: 11000 registered lightning strikes, 34.4 millimeters of rain (34 liters per cubic meter) during 12 hours most of which fell down in a fairly short time consisting of only a few hours.

Original photo by Flickr user Alberto Jaspe, used and remixed by Gla'funk under a Creative Commons license.