We had some severe thunderstorms move through the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area yesterday afternoon that pelted my house with marble-sized hail. (There were reports of “tennis ball” hail in the area, although the largest I saw on the news was closer to “golf ball.”)
I heard sirens and along with the rattle of chunks of ice raining hard against the windows upstairs, I decided I better wake up my 16-month-old daughter from her nap and head to the basement with the dog and whatever cats I could collect along the way. (My wife was at work.)
By the time I got down there and logged in to an old computer to check the radar, the heavy stuff had passed. I went up to see what TV news had to say about the whole thing, and was treated to this staple of Minneapolis storm reporting:
“This storm has a history of producing high winds and hail.” And so on. “This storm has a history of (blah blah blah)…”
It sounds just a touch pretentious, don’t you think?* What’s next, Mr. Weather Person? Are you going to hold up a manila folder and say, “I have its file right here. This is a bad one, it is. Just look at this rap sheet. Tsk, tsk.”
Can’t we simply say: “This storm has produced high winds and hail.”?
*Let’s not discuss my own glass house of self-important ramblings, vulnerable to the stinging hail of irony.
Related:The Recklessness of Storms
2 Comments
Yah, we felt them down here in Iowa, too. No hail, but plenty of rain and lightening.
So one storm passed and it cleared up, and I set out for a quick walk to the corner market for just a couple things. Ten minutes there, a minute inside, and came back out – and it was like God in Heaven overflowed his bathtub! I ended up hanging out at the store for about an hour until it cleared up again.
How did you like that one big snow/ice storm around the end of February? That was the last time we had trees pulled down from a storm in our area.
27 May 2007 at 11:50 pm
Hey, Pete. It seems like you guys are getting all the storms these past couple of years — all the time I notice large storms rolling through Iowa and missing us up here.
I had read your post about the Feb. storm and meant to comment on it (or did I?) — you had it a lot worse down there. I think it was just a snowstorm for us here, without all the ice.
Thanks for stopping by — I enjoy reading your blog and have been planning to point to one of your recent posts that relates to what I’ve been doing lately.
28 May 2007 at 9:52 am