Tisdale Gets 3/10ths

FTLComm - Tisdale - Thursday, July 18, 2002

The lawns in town despite efforts with garden hoses were all beginning to look similar to the open playing fields in town which had all turned a sickly yellow from the concentrated heat of the last two weeks. Out in the countryside the peas are history for this year, the Canola looks tough but is in flower, alfalfa is short and the wheat and barley crops have started to turn gold as the heat has dried them up. Photographer's Note: The picture seen above is rather unusual because it is a composite of two images. The base image is a natural light picture of the scene using a digital camera. Then the second exposure is a flash picture taken of the same scene. The two pictures are then blended together, the spherical rain drops isolated and the dark background taken out of the second flash picture so that you can see the rain drops caught in the light of the flash and the rest of the image is in natural light. One hates to say the obvious but the drought of 2002 has already taken effect and only some fields will benefit from rain at this point. Yesterday morning there was a gentle shower at breakfast time that left the streets shiny and even made a little puddle or two. The temperature built up through the day and by evening the sky was darkening and towering cumulus were developing to the Southeast. We had been out to dinner and dropped into a food store to pick a few things up just before they closed and with our leisurely shopping complete we were at the check out tile about half done when the building went dark and the emergency lights came on. Moments later the place shook several times as pounding thunder drummed on the metal roof. Our shopping trip was over and I went out to bring the car up to the main entrance. But before I did so I enjoyed the rain which was not falling that hard but by then was letting up a little as there were huge moving sheets of water on the parking lot. I snapped the picture you see above.

Though there was a light rain for almost forty minutes the initial downpour was the main event. The electrical failure took about forty minutes for SaskPower to sort out and during that time we were able to sit under an eve and watch the lightning dance across the sky. This morning the temperature rose quickly and with the 77% humidity it seemed much hotter than the 20º C temperature would normally feel. After breakfast we had another attempt at picking up some groceries and this time the power did not go off and I captured the image above as the sky was shaping up to bring us a morning dampening then it cleared off into a humid hot day. With three computers caught in the power outage two made it through the problem without incident but the server that handles our e-mail and hosting for some of our web sites had a bitter problem as a hard drive did not recover and had to be replaced.