Biblical weather

It's funny how one's mind plays tricks.

Six or seven months of nice warm weather (albeit with a few grey days and a couple of cold days where it dipped below 15 degrees), and I'd forgotten what it was like last summer.

Boy the heat and humidity this weekend was near-to unbearable ... 36 degrees and 93% humidity yesterday morning (according to the thermometer in the car and HK observatory readings). So hot, we had to come back from the beach.

Lucky we did!

Absolutely UNREAL electrical rainstorm happened about 1 hour after we arrived home. We could see the rain-band coming ... people rushing off the beach below us as it approached from the right hand side of the bay to the left. And (poor guys) an outside wedding was getting washed out too.

In fact it rained so hard you could not see a hand at the end of your arm. And according to the HK observatory real-time lightning radar (very cool ... click here) yesterday in Hong Kong there were 4027 cloud to land lightning strikes and 1649 cloud to cloud strikes.

Billy and I sat on the balcony with our hands over our ears (thunder was booming round the hills). All a bit surreal -- I was attempting to teach him to play chess (hard work with a 6 year old best of times) but my talk of Kings and Queens and Knights was illuminated and mood-enhanced by the atmospherics.

DOH! I've realised it's difficult to teach someone to play chess -- easy enough to relay the moves the pieces have, but difficult to explain the nuances of check and check mate etc. I'll get a book to help me (there are plenty of "teach your kids to pay chess books") & I have seen a children's chess set that has the moves the individual pieces can make engraved in the base of each piece.

After the storm it felt slightly cooler, but still humid. The hills behind us boasted some new waterfalls and across the bay we saw the thickest rainbow we've ever seen -- even more marvelous was the fact it was near-vertical ... a perpendicular colour shaft reaching directly upwards. Cool!

M