When severe storms rolled into my hometown of Chatfield the other night, they can with a great lightning show. So, I decided to try and catch some action on my camera.

Now, I’ve tried this before and it’s not an easy task unless your camera is setup to automatically take a picture every few seconds. Mine isn’t, but I was still able to get a few great shots due to the large amount of lighting and lots of patients.

Most of my 200 pictures turned out like this:

However, I did manage to catch lightning a few times:

This is our backyard, can you tell what’s wrong with this picture?

What if I said I live in Minnesota? What if I said we are in the mist of a severe drought?

For some reason, there are parts of our lawn that are bright green and don’t dry out. Not even in a severe drought. I haven’t watered but I did have to mow today and it just doesn’t make sense. How can lawns and crops be dying across the state and parts of our backyard is alive and well!

Yesterday, severe storms ran across the area and prompted tornado warnings for us. I was actually out watching these storms roll in as the sirens sounded. No tornadoes, but some brief decent sized hail, lots of pea sized hail and some rain and wind did come out of them.

On the Mac, there are some fantastic applications that are completely free. Here is a list of what I believe to be some of the best I’ve found so far.

• Adium - The all in one, completely customizable instant messaging program. It absolutely rocks!
• AOL Radio - I love this because I can get nearly commercial free streaming music from all genres.
• AppFresh* - Only free while in development, AppFresh keeps me up-to-date on what installed programs are not up-to-date.
• Butler - Applications & Folders in the menu bar are so handy. Plus it can do so much more.

Our Vegas trip is over and the 85 degree days have been replaced with a 28 degree Minnesota day. It’s good to be home again, but it’s to darn cold.

While out in Vegas I got to ride the rides at the top of the Stratosphere tower and the rides are relatively lame, but on top of a skyscraper, they are amazing. Each one sits over 100 stories above the ground and just the thought of them makes most people scared.

Over the weekend, our TV came in stock at Target and we were all over that. We now have a nice new high definition TV for watching movies and playing Wii!

I didn’t realize that you could get HDTV over the normal airwaves too. I was delighted when I got one HD channel with the antenna on our house that was probably installed in the 1950s. With a little playing around, I ended up with 8 HD TV channels! One of which is a 24hour local weather channel. Sweet.

Well I asked for it, a real snow storm, and we got one. I’m not sure the exact amount but it’s somewhere over 15 inches. Maybe even 20. Here are a few photos we took this morning.

Down the street with the flash on.

The snow drift on the deck.

View off the deck.

Neighbors ice cycles.

Side of our driveway, but you can’t really see it, or the street or the car.

A look down the street. Check out the snow on the roofs.

Down the street the other way.

Well it’s been hyped all week, the biggest snow storm in years. We’d have 3-5 inches Friday night, up to 8 on Saturday and another 5 or so on Saturday night. Well here it is, Saturday morning at 9:30 and we are just getting our first flakes. I’m skeptical that we’ll get a foot. That’s what we need to have the biggest snow storm this year. To have the biggest in years, we’ll need at least 15 inches.

Something tells me, that ain’t gonna happen. However, if we do, we’ll be happy! We have lots of movies and TV shows to watch and are looking forward to be stuck in this weekend.

I told you it was cold here in Minnesota. I don’t think we’ve hit 0 since Friday and it’s not exactly going to warm up anytime soon. Granted 12 is going to feel balmy and by the time it hits 30 we’ll be in shorts.

However, it’s so cold that I think my airbag is frozen. This morning my little airbag light came on and hasn’t gone off since. It has an appointment on Wednesday to get looked at but just to find out what’s wrong is more than I want to pay. Maybe I should just let it thaw out.

Not exactly sure what that means but it’s cold enough to freeze anything you got. Our highs this weekend will be lucky to hit 0 and windshields will range from -15 to -40. I’m considering plugging in my car for the first time in years. However it’s to cold to go outside and do so.