As of yesterday, Nathan is a six-month-old baby. There will be photos in a day or two, as soon as I can get the time to sit down and upload them. For those of you on Facebook, you can find a few of them on Susan’s profile — there’s a link to it in the right-hand column. I would say the boy had a good half birthday with a meal of sweet potatoes and some fun time at the grocery store with mom and dad.
Oh, and he also got to see yet another massive thunderstorm from his car seat.
Mirroring our experience near Butte on the Fourth of July, we were on our way back from the store when a powerful storm hit Bozeman. The rain was torrential, driven by gusts up to 40 miles per hour in the city and up to 75 miles per hour in the surrounding areas. Bozeman received 0.65 inches of rain in 15 minutes (read the NWS storm summary).
Did I mention this was the second big thunderstorm of the day?
Anyway, we drove the few blocks home in nearly white-out conditions and parked to wait for a break in the storm. That’s pretty much when the hail started. It was marble-sized for us but other areas received three-quarter-inch hail and larger. (Some areas got hit with 1.75-inch hail.)
Sitting there in the loud car, we noted that the power was out in our apartment complex. Since our stove is electric, we decided there was no point going inside just yet, so we drove around down after the hail ended. The streets were clogged with leaves and many roads were blocked by broken trees and downed power lines. A lot of storm drains were gushing water like geysers and many sloped streets had turned into rivers (TV news story and Daily Chronicle story).
All in all, a fun and wet evening, even though Nathan slept through most of the carnage. Mother Nature is providing us with an interesting insight into our boy this summer: he can sleep through hailstorms pounding on the roof of a car.
Edit: Here are a few more photos of the storm, snapped by an electrical engineering professor at MSU with a passion for the atmosphere. They’re better than anything I’ve seen in the news.
