To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance.
-- The Buddha
Another thunder shower evening. Roughly, like it normally is in July-August. We didn't get the rain but had a spectalucar sunset. The sky to the west turned yellow, then intense yellow. I went outside and had never seen anything like it. Everything was yellow like looking through an odd camera lens. Last night, just after sundown, we had a lightning display. It was very odd. The bolts of lightning instead of going down shot across the sky or laced the undersides of the cloud layer like spiderwebs. This evening we had lightning to the east. At a guess, about 50 flashes a minute.
We also have another oddness with the weather here. Freak gusts of wind. A couple of years ago a friend had a miniature tornado set down in his yard. A clump of bamboo weighing several hundred pounds was hurled across the yard about 100 feet and several dozen heavy ceramic roof tiles were ripped off.
Three days ago in another one of those gusty pre-thunderstorms the Government office in Mae Rim, about a mile from our house, got hit by a similar freak wind storm. Most of the windows of the 5 story building were blown out and a ceiling collapsed. They estimate 5 million baht damage.
One of the other remarkable weather phenomenons I have seen here was the sky turning a vivid, unmistakable green one evening for a few minutes about 3 years ago. The atmospherics around the Himalayan uplift specialize in oddness that drives meteorologists crazy.