Hail-y enough for you?

My neighbor, Patrick Kelley, has a webcam and has posted a time-lapse version of Thursday's storms. The big stuff starts to fall around 11:20. The evening storm part is also pretty cool.

You can see my car at 1:10:41 and 4:42:35 - going to and returning from my auto body repair estimate. While I was in the Cities, I took my grandfather's baritone ukelele to Hoffman Guitars to see if they could repair a crack in the body which has been there for a couple of years. Signs point to said crack arising from child-initiated trauma, but so far no one has copped to the charge.

I was inspired by this video, which Lobachevsky (or Tromvestite, as Bleeet has dubbed him) posted on his blog. Amazing. The young man's name is Jake Shimabukuro, and he is a rising superstar in the ukelele world, if there is such a thing.

And superstars love hail. Hey, speaking of hail, it occurred to me on Thursday that estimating hail size is a little tricky. First of all, hailstones have a tendency to deform or explode on impact. And since you don't want to go traipsing out into the storm and risk getting nailed with one of those puppies, some meltage must occur before an accurate measurement can be taken. Looking out my window, I would swear some of those hailstones were bigger than baseballs. Hitting my roof, they sounded like medicine balls. But the largest one (mostly undeformed) from my freezer is 2.5 inches in diameter. Technically tennis ball sized. Or between raw oyster and stink bomb sized, depending on your scale.

The Mini and the house got dented. A window got broken. Our insurance agent got a headache. We got to spend some quality time as a family in the basement, burning candles, playing a board game, and listening to the radio. No one got seriously hurt. Blessings got counted.

I looked hard to find a website with hail-related maladies, principally trauma, I assumed. There is this, which, frankly, isn't very impressive. There are plenty of sites that focus on crop damage from hail, but this is not a horticultural blog. Yet.

In honor of our recent visitation with hailstones, let's go with chilblains for our Malady of the Month. It's almost got "chill" right in the name.