A Rekindled Flame

It has been more than two years since I have had a passion for weather. Sure, I check the forecast and pull up the models from time to time... mainly just to see what I should wear, if it will rain, when it will rain, and for travel/beach/outdoor activity reasons. I think that college smothered that weather-interest flame, or at least it did the last year or so. I very well remember walking out of Synoptic Meteorology and thinking, "I will not look at weather again today!"

When I was at home for those two months in between college and my first job, I was not able to look at the weather, thanks to dial-up internet. Then at the Buoy Center, I honestly was never one to be one top of what was going on across the United States. Sure, I knew what the weather and synoptic situations were for the operation areas but nothing more than that. I was on last April both days when severe weather ripped across the South and home. But I was not watching it until it was close to DeKalb, Mississippi. I watched in utter amazement and total horror as that well-known tornado approached, devastated, and moved on through Tuscaloosa. But I believe that staring at a computer screen all day is part of the reason why I have not generated my own forecast in more than two years or looked at weather much at all. It sucks to have to stare at a computer screen all day. Why would I want to fixate my eyes on one for another 1-3 hours after I get off work? Blah.

But now being totally removed from weather for the past two months and being in an office with a weather chaser and hearing Frederick be referred to as "The Weather Man," I am pumped to dive back into it! And from being out of it for so long, I am definitely a severe weather lover. Seeing the High and Moderate Risk put out for today honestly makes my heart beat faster and my adrenaline glands ready to shoot out their hormones.

And this is a great start! So many things in weather interested me that I had no clue what I liked the best, what to pursue and research. I now know it is the stuff that everyone dreads... the severe thunderstorms that blow things over, drop hail, spit out tornadoes beneath their intimidating rotating-cloud structures... supercells. But atmospheric chemistry is still in the back of my mind, since I loved chemistry in high school and college. (Nerd? Maybe. But it just makes so much sense! There are very few variations in the way that things can combine. Ever balanced a chemical equation? (sigh) Good stuff.)

This is cool! There is a passion a-brewing, a prior suppressed passion that is. And now I have to question... Is this just me wanting to put my mind to work again or is this something that God will use in my future? Or both? Since I just threw the God-card into the mix, I am still in awe of the power that my God, the one and only God, possesses. How amazing is it that God can be in total control of something so violent and destructive and massive as an EF-5 today ripping through a town in Alabama, but yet He can command the seas to lie flat.... and they instantly do at the sound of His word? How? That's a magnificent thought. Amazing.