Have your cake and eat it too

 I just had some of the best chocolate cake of my life. A friend of ours has her own bakery, and Ron asked her to make a chocolate cake to celebrate our return to Samara. Once I've eaten the cake it's gone. But the memory lives on.
  Last night was wild and crazy good cake and a crazy wicked storm and crazy horrid itchiness from mosquitoes. The thunder started in the distance around 2pm. It wasn't very impressive, enough to keep me out of the water, but not from going on a walk on the beach. We went for a little walk around 6pm, arriving back as it was finally getting dark. We were a tiny bit nervous on the way home, there were constant flashes of lightening, just brief illuminations of the clouds in the sky. Maybe I couldn't see many bolts of lightening because it was going from cloud to cloud. As the sun set and the light faded the flashes were more apparent. I was glad I didn't have a seizure disorder, because it was constant.
  We arrived back right before the rain started. When Ron and I were walking the beach you could barely tell there was lightening, it would be a nanosecond brightening of the sky. After we got home and it was darker outside we could see many bolts and more flashes. The sound of thunder was very constant, naturally. But it started out sounding very low and relatively quiet, it made me think of the sky having an enormous belly that was empty, and grumbling for some dinner. After we got home the lightening stepped up and so did the thunder. Hours of great booms, only once did I feel like ducking down because it sounded like the sky was falling. That was the loudest boom of the night. It reminded me of when I worked at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. We had free tickets to all kinds of concerts, and sometimes we had employee nights at the nightclub. Have you ever been to one of those kinds of things and the drink in your hand was vibrating with the sound coming out of the speakers? It was like that a lot last night. It was all none stop until about 9pm.
  Not to mention the pouring rain. I just sat and watched and listened. The rain would get so loud sometimes, interrupted by the lightening. It was different depending on the magnitude of the rain. Sometimes it would drown out conversation. Sometimes it just sounded lovely because even a light rain sounds good on a tin back porch. Or hitting a broad banana leaf. Rain makes me happy. When we left in April it hadn't really rained since December. The jungle dried up, leaves fell off the trees. We had to water the garden every day, or else. Now the jungle is bursting with more greenness than ever. I didn't even think greenness was a word, but my spellcheck didn't come up. I guess I didn't invent the word like I thought. Plus the rain brings down the temperature. March and the first week of April were unbearable. Now it's delightfully warm, not exasperatingly hot. Oh, that's a big word, what is that, 6 syllables? Maybe I should just say it was frustrating. Annoying. You get the picture.
  No more dust rising up in big clouds from the road every time a car goes by. Now it's an abundance of puddles. I have a great fondness for puddles, right down to the name given to them. However it has brought more mosquitoes. Sigh. Being here means dealing with bug bites. I accept that. I wouldn't want to deny bugs their own right to paradise. The jungle couldn't exist without them. 96% of the time I get bites and they don't even bother me all that much. Last night was the 4%. Man, it was all kinds of awful. We turned the lights back on and I was reading a really good book, and before I realized it I had scratched the heck out of my knee. I used lavender essential oil, I used the magnets from fridge ornaments, I used my organic stick of deodorant - and still I suffered. Next time (tonight??) I'm going to try cold compresses and cutting my fingernails way down. It was just ridiculous to itch like that. It's bad enough they take my blood, but leave me itchy too? How rude.
  Oh, and no, there is no threat of the Zika virus in this area. Maybe dengue. Or malaria. Wish me luck.


  Here is my science lesson for the day, for myself. I wanted to know more about lightening.


  Water and ice move around inside the cloud; forced up by warm air currents, down by gravity, and compressed in the cloud. Just as rubbing a balloon can create static electricity, the particles in the cloud become charged. It’s not clear how it happens, but charges separate in the cloud. Positive charges move up, and negatives move down.

Once a significant charge separation has built up, the positive and negative charges seek to reach each other and neutralize. ‘Streamers’ come up from the ground to form a pathway. Once a pathway is completed a spark forms, neutralizing the charge.

As the negative charge races down, the air surrounding it heats up.The spark is very hot at almost 20,000 degrees Celsius, and it rapidly heats the air to create a shock wave.

Considering light travels very fast – about 300 million meters per second, and that sound only travels at 300 meters per second; light is a million times faster than the sound produced. To find out how far away the storm is, you can count how long you hear the sound after the lightning. For every 4 seconds between the flash and the rumble, the thunderstorm is 1 mile away. 

That last part is only possible during a "normal" storm, unlike the one last night. There was just constant lightening and thunder, and I was impressed by Nature all over again.