Weather only a Texan could love...

Those back on the other side of the pond may have never thought about it, but Germany (at least this region of Germany) has the type of Spring "toad stranglers" that makes an Oklahoma/Texas boy homesick. Sure, they don't have sirens that go off at the most inconvenient times imaginable or massive twisters that decimate entire cities, but there's something about torrential downpours and ear-splitting thunder that makes a guy (from the Great Plains anyway) feel right at home.
A week ago Friday, I saw it rain about as hard as I've ever seen it. The basement of our building flooded and all that lay between me and a flooded car was good ol' Oklahoman determination. Today it rained hard as hard as the dickens (the absolute zenith on the Oklahoma precipitation scale) and even hailed again.
The weather lately has reminded me of Gary England, a local meteorologist in Oklahoma City that garnered a modicum of notoriety outside Oklahoma with his appearance in the movie "Twister". Although he's saved at least thousands of lives during his career, there was a completely jaded part of me growing up that always thought there was at least a little fear mongering going on. A completely apocryphal recreation of a Gary England broadcast, cerca 1981 (you'll have to imagine the following delivered with a frantic Oklahoma accent), as "Murder she Wrote" is interrupted for a special meteorological report:

"Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is Gary England in the Channel 9 Storm Watch Center. Channel 9 radar shows we've got a mezocyclone forming a few miles South of Enid. We're already picking up rotation so this thing could very quickly develop into one of the most catastrophic storms in memory. Wait a second... Never mind. It's a flock of quail. Stay tuned to Channel 9." I'll bet a six pack of Stag beer there's a least one Oklahoman reading this post and chuckling.