July Blows In

One question I asked myself this weekend was, "Haven't there been enough Spiderman movies?" That's because marketing for the latest such movie finally got my attention, for all of a few seconds. My answer is, yes, there have been. I can't take Spiderman seriously anyway, because of lasting first impressions. As far as I'm concerned, Spiderman is pretty much this (which has had a remarkable 23+ million views). Just as Batman is this. .

Today during the early afternoon, the sky darkened as if a thunderstorm were getting ready to hit. The wind picked up and it got even darker. A classic pre-thunderstorm sky. Except that it didn't start raining. Instead, the wind grew stronger. Ann was so worried about a "tornado," she asked me to look out the back door.

It was a wicked wind, all right. A couple of loose items were moving across the back yard and the all the trees within sight were shaking. But I assured her that this wasn't a tornado. I wasn't quite sure that some major tree part wouldn't fall, however.

It was over in about 20 minutes. No rain, just dark clouds and high wind. At about 4, I took Lilly to a bookstore a couple of miles south of where we live. By then, the clouds were mostly gone and the summer heat had returned. Along the way, we discovered that starting about half a mile away, every traffic light along our route was out of order -- making for some tricky eight-lane, four-way stops. Tree branches were scattered in the street in spots, and a handful of trees along the way had been split in half or knocked over, though none directly into the street. Parts of fences were down in places, too. We'd had a wind event.

Small potatoes compared to a real tornado, say, or the storms that pummeled the eastern U.S. on Friday. But enough to remind you that the atmosphere has the potential to knock you around when it feels like it.