Thunder and Lightning

 

I did not attend the official opening of the sculpture festival on Friday afternoon. The clouds were gathering around noon…

And then Thor threw his hammer again.

Thor’s hammer

In Old Norse mythology, the god Thor rode through the heavens on a chariot pulled by two goats. Thor was known for his quick and hot temper. Lightning flashed whenever he threw his hammer Mjollnir ("crusher") which would return to his hand again after being thrown.

Thor was foremost of the gods to the common man and widely worshiped. Hammer shaped amulets were worn about the neck well into the Christianization of Scandinavia. Molds have been found which contain both cross and hammer shapes, side by side. His name occurs in numerous place names; and also lives on in one of the days of the week: Thursday. (Swedish: torsdag) Thor is associated to the Roman god Jupiter, the German god Donar, and the Anglo-Saxon god Thunor.

 

*A flash of lightning, followed after some seconds by a rumble of thunder is, for many people, the first illustration of the fact that sound travels more slowly than light.

*Lightning is approximately one kilometer distant for every 2.9 seconds that elapse between the visible flash and the first sound of thunder (or one mile for every 4.6 seconds).

*A flash of lightning and a simultaneous sharp "crack" of thunder indicates that the lightning strike was very near.

Thunderstorm

Today I was lucky. In spite of first checking in on my email and some blog posts this morning, I managed to also get to the grocery store in town and back before it started raining. We then had thunder circling around for hours; and really, really heavy rain - if I had been out in it, I would have got soaked to the skin in less than two minutes, no matter how many umbrellas.

No wonder I was feeling "under the weather" even earlier... I seem to be extremely sensitive to changes in the weather/ atmospheric pressure (??) these days, but am still having a hard time getting used to that! (Makes me feel old...) I keep wondering what I've been "doing" some days to make me feel so extra achy and miserable - and then the answer comes to me in a flash (quite literally)...

Safe and dry indoors, with the rain pouring down outside, I let myself be nailed to my bed for the worst of it this afternoon, distracting myself with a good book - the kind you just want to keep on reading but at the same time don't want to finish too fast: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. I'm half way through, just hoping I won't change my mind about it at the end! The only thing I regret is getting the Swedish translation instead of the English original, because that makes it hard to quote from here...

Anyway. One of the characters in the book is a woman suffering from pain. She calls the pain her "wolf" and says the wolf attacks her especially in the hour before she is allowed to take her next dose of pain killers. I can relate to that, even though neither my pains nor my pills are of the "deadly" kind... But I believe the image will stick with me!

I'm feeling the wolf's claws in my shoulder right now so better end this post quickly.

Got some good news yesterday, though - I'm getting another 6 months period of training in the rehab pool (warm water), twice a week, starting soon. Doesn't drown the wolf, but helps keep it tamed...

Cloudy picture:

Not from today but taken by me a couple of years ago.