Crashing around

Ahh, I love thunderstorms. Especially when the lightning is really putting on a show. I love to turn off the lights in the house, listen to the rain pour down and watch the sky light up. There's something very comforting about the setting.

I've inherited my father's radar-watching gene so I knew the storm was coming. Actually, I knew scattered storms were predicted but hadn't yet checked on the radar. Tonight was the last week of my summer golf league and I was so tired that I decided I didn't have the energy to get frustrated on the golf course this week like I have all the others. I blew it off. When I looked outside 10 minutes before my scheduled tee time, the sky was dark. Ooh, the excitement of an impending storm...and a rain date to boot!

I ran to my laptop and there it was in all it's glory...the red blotch of severe storms heading toward us. I set the scene, I turned the lights off and waited.

While I sat in the dark, The Swede was in the family room assembling the wall mount for our plasma tv. First I heard a loud crash outside, then another inside. The Swede dropped it just taking it out of the box and now we have a gash in our nice hardwood floors. : (

A minute later, he called me in to assist him in reading the directions and trying to figure out how to assemble this thing. What?? Doesn't he know that I'm settling in for my thunderstorm entertainment and that, surely, by the time we're done hanging the tv the storm will have passed and I will have missed it? I silently walked in, briskly picked up the instructions with a heavy sigh (why wasn't he noticing my lack of enthusiasm and excusing me from this chore?) I began to read through the directions. The product was obviously from China or one of those countries that employs some well-meaning but no talent translator. I could hardly make heads or tails out of the text. Thank goodness it had diagrams. I'm good at deciphering diagrams. I had fun reading the instructions verbatim while The Swede followed along, step by step. Meanwhile, the sky was lighting up and the thunder was booming.

For the most part, I missed the storm. But on the bright side, just think how nice The Weather Channel will look mounted on our wall.