Stormy Weather

I don't want to talk about schoolwork right now, except to assure you that I'm totally on top of it and not stressed out in the slightest. Not at all. What I do want to talk about is the weather. In Florida we have two seasons: wet and dry. We have (finally!) started the wet season. I love the afternoon thunderstorms. And the midnight thunderstorms most of all. Honestly, I just love thunder, especially when I'm snug indoors with my face pressed to the glass, hearing the surrounding murmer of rain and feeling the windows rattle with every boom. Florida is a pyrogenic environment, and the lightning strike capital of the world. It's also the capital of cars bursting into flame, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to lightning and the heat, and how much is due to Firecracker. Either way, I'm looking forward to the storms.
The air before a thunderstorm is heavy with expectation. The skies are a moody black, instead of their usual relentless blue during the day, or gaudy orange at sunset. Florida doesn't do brooding weather very well most of the time, but we have some truly awesome thunderstorms. The wind picks up, blowing away the stifling heat. If you're looking close enough, sometimes you can see the rain racing towards you. Florida rain is serious business. It falls in fat drops that slam the rooftops and bounce up off the ground, rendering umbrellas useless. Within minutes, the runoff has created puddles so deep that it's almost worth the ringworm to jump in them barefoot. I can stand outside spraying snow as hard as I can in all directions, and it still won't measure up to Florida rain. I did that this afternoon during the storm, and I couldn't see the difference between when I was creating water and when I was just being rained on. I really need to start putting my phone in a ziplock bag or something before I do crap like that, because I'm not sure if I broke it. It was turned off, and I'm letting it dry before I try it again. It's an old phone anyway (and it did glow green the one time, so it's kinda expendable). I don't trust (and my parents don't trust me with) new technology. After a couple years locked in a battle of wills with my laptop, I'm terrified that any complex technology will attain sentience and deem me (and by extension humanity) unworthy of leadership and then it will take over the world and it will all be my fault for not stopping it. So no iPhone for me.
The best part of any storm is the thunder. It's so much more thrilling and dignified than fireworks, and leaves no smoke to obscure further flashes. I saw Stormcloud once, before she left for Shining Citadel, but her javelins had a sharper sound, more like a whip crack than deliciously deep rolling thunder. I guess it was because she was only a few blocks away. Either way, she didn't make that much of an impression, sorry to say. It only took her the one strike to end the fight. I'm fairly sure I saw her face off against a Titan as well, but even through the binoculars there was just a huge fluffy cloud occasionally lit up by flashes of orange light and little threads of lightning. It was way out at sea, at night, and too far north for us to get anything worse than really choppy waves the day after.