It's That Time Of The Year

Well T-Storm season is back in full force. Yesterday we got a nasty one. Dropped an inch and a half in about an hour at my house. Kendall was getting 2 inches an hour. Sometimes we get storms that move by. Yesterday we had storms that just popped up out of nowhere and didn't move, they just kept ballooning.

I really like thunderstorms. I could sit on my back patio for hours sippin a virgin margarita and watching the storms, listening to the thunder. The rain here is completely different that the rain I grew up with in Southern California. It gets so dark even at noon during a storm that you would think it's midnight and all the street lights turn on. And then of course after the rain it's sunny and hot again. Had a nice sunny sunset last night.

Anyways here are a couple pictures I thought I would share from yesterday.

Different layers in the clouds. Thunderstorms in Florida can get 12 miles high which is why we get such heavy rain. It also makes the clouds look super awesome. In the far background, the dark grey is where the heaviest rain and lowest clouds are. In Florida you can see the rain coming like a wall.






And then we get little stray low clouds like below. It's funny when it's sunny outside and we get these low stray clouds 100 feet above the ground and they are sometimes nearly black.




Not much else new to report. I had a big nasty toad I had to exterminate in my yard. Not an easy task for me since everyone knows I like frogs and toads. But Cuban Frogs and Marine Toads are an invasive species here and they are destroying the environment. I have been trying to get native frogs to lay eggs in my pond by I have a huge Marine Toad, about the size of a cantelope and a half (a good couple pounds), that eats all the native frogs. Trying to kill him was a pain in the butt. I tried to impale him with a long garden stake without getting guts on me. The stake wouldn't penetrate the skin, it wasn't pointed, it just slipped off. I hit it a couple times with the machete and it cut the toad but wouldn't kill it. I found my blowgun but couldn't find any darts for it. I'll have to order more but even these wouldn't be an easy kill since the toad is so big I would have to hit vital organs or poison the darts. Finally I got sick of dealing with it so I used a small cup of pool acid. He was hiding in the bushes and I hit him with some acid. I felt pretty bad about it. I don't like killing animals for no good reason, of course this was for a good reason but I still don't like the way I had to do it. But it had to be done. Hopefully soon I'll start getting the North American Green Tree Frogs and Squirrel Tree Frogs in my yard. I just have to keep up with the horrible task of killing the Marine Toads. I wish I could just pull out the shotgun and get it done with the quick way.