Beautiful morning today.  Yesterday we had a series of thunderstorms roll thru, each one worse than the last.  It would be really nice for about an hour, then a thunderstorm would rip thru with lots of wind, thunder, and lightning and a little rain; lasting about 20-30 minutes.  Then nice for about an hour until the next t-storm rolled thru.  Lots of reports of downed trees and power lines.

At one point about 3 PM I needed to run into GR for fencing supplies (working on the pasture fence during the lulls between storms).  On the way in I saw a tree leaning against a power line and smoking.  I pulled off the road, called 911 and reported it. By the time I got off the phone there were flames on the ground.  Another guy in a pick-up stopped, grabbed the bed liner from his truck and started beating out flames (very windy at this point) I ran across the road and helped him until we had the flames pretty much confined to the area right under where the sparks were falling.  Sometime during this the GRPD pulled up and sat there watching us.  When we had the flames confined to the one small area he yelled at us to get out of there, the GRFD was on the way and he didn't want to see us get caught by the power line if it came down.  Well, we didn't want to get caught by the power line either, we had been watching it and talking about as we beat down the flames.  So we beat feet as fast as we could and got out of there.

Drove by about 8 PM, looked like the line didn't break.  The tree was chopped into 10-15 foot sections, and the burned area on the ground was about twice as big as when we left, but they contained it.

Drove around a bit more.  The last of the storms had passed, none on the horizon anyways.  Saw several other places with downed power lines and lots of downed trees.

Found out what caused the major power outage the other day.  Two mating seagulls bridged a main transformer.

I put the rain gauge out on Thursday.  With all those thunderstorms we barely had enough rain to try to read, like maybe 1/8 inch.

Todays forecast is for clear and bright.

I noticed on my cruise last night that gas fell to 3.679.  Whooppee.