Kansas in New York!

You know those little oxymoronical, paradoxical phrases, like "Christmas in July"?

Today we had freaking Kansas in New York. And last Friday we had it, too. This is getting to be a scary freaking habit and I would like to lodge a major complaint to someone.

Last Friday, as I was coming home from work, I got on the parkway and it began to rain. It didn't start slowly and build, it began with giant drops that sounded like metal hitting the car and it just opened up in a torrent. Within seconds it was zero visibility and I felt like I had entered a weather wormhole. Lightning was everywhere around the car. In a three-mile stretch, there were fourteen strikes within very close proximity to the parkway...the crack of the thunder came almost instantly following the lightning. It was one of the most terrifying storms I have ever driven in, and being from Kansas, I have seen some really scary weather...really scary. Pea- to marble-sized hail fell for about four minutes. Now I know you Kansans and midwesterners are saying, "BFD. Marble-size hail for four minutes is nothing." Well, it's not nothing for Long Island. We don't have pea- to marble-sized hail. Hail, when we even have it, is usually tiny, like pebbles. We don't have cumulonimbus clouds here, but on Friday, we had a nasty, nasty one that was about 26,000 feet high and it moved across Long Island, over the sound and up through the Connecticut/New York border and even made it to Boston, and from a distance, it was even scarier - you could see the evil electrical giant coursing with all manner of horrible lightning. Hail and nasty tornado weather aren't supposed to be showing up here. Yet since I have lived here, we have had tornadoes on Long Island three times. I say Al Gore is right and the apocalypse is going to happen within our lifetime if we don't reverse global warming.

Fast forward to today when, on the way home, I noticed a very large severe storm in my rear view mirror as I headed east on the highway. Jess has called and said it had been in his area and it was horrible. It was heading south and slightly west at a very high rate of speed. I was glad I was going east, because it was a nasty shade of purple-black, and it was chock-full of lightning. But as I approached the supermarket where I needed to stop before going home, I saw an enormous cloud building to the north, almost boiling, and approaching the south shore at a scary pace. Lightning started cracking all around. I ran into the store, took 3 minutes to find what I needed, checked myself out, and ran to my car. Getting into the car, it was Friday deja vu - the big rain drops, the hard and rapid downpour with almost zero visibility, and lightning strikes like crazy. I had to take surface streets home since I was well away from the parkway, and that wasn't pretty. The downpour was causing flooding all along my route home. It was a nightmare. I was exhausted after the 15-minute drive home.

This crap ain't supposed to happen here.