Lightning

Wednesday, September 15, 2010
6:49 AM in Kolonia, 12:49 PM at home

Yay! Halfway through the week again! I love these 4-day school weeks! Friday is UN Day, so there’s no school, just teacher in-service. And it sounds like I might be doing first aid/CPR refresher courses. We’ll see.

School’s been going pretty well. For me at least. The majority of my chemistry students bombed their first unit test. I haven’t decided how to deal with that yet. I was feeling pretty good about yesterday’s physics test, but graded three of them last night and got so depressed I just went to bed, haha.

Monday morning we had the most awesome lightning storm ever! It was SO LOUD. The storms in Montana have nothing on this one. I was scared split, and it was so much fun! I loved every minute of it. The rain is loud enough as it is, but you couldn’t hear it when the lightning would strike. Two times it was so close I swear I heard the thunder before I saw the flash. (There’s nothing like looking up at 4:00 in the morning to your ceiling which is being illuminated by a great, electrical light and realizing that you really ought to do something about the spider webs in the corner…) After the first clap of thunder went off, I rolled over and heard Kendra whisper from the bottom bunk, “Laura? Are you awake?” I should have pretended to snore. We had a nice chat for about 20 minutes until the storm subsided. It felt like it was all over the island. It would be right above us, then 6 or 7 miles away, then right back again. Actually, it made me feel like I was just on a very tiny island in the middle of the ocean. In retrospect, we really ought to have gotten out of bed and gone and crashed on the couch… Especially since our beds are in the corner between two windows, we live under a metal roof, and there are bars over all our windows… Yeah, that wasn’t really smart. But lack of sleep from camping and being awake at 4:00 AM aren’t really conducive to genius thoughts. But it was a sweet storm to experience. Apparently they don’t get many electrical storms here at all. This is the second one we’ve had. I’m loving it here.