It was a dark and stormy night....

Last night was one of the craziest storms I've ever slept through. We both woke up about 2, either because of the disco strobe light brightness in our room or the sound of the world breaking into bits, I don't know. We were in the center of the thunderstorm, with lightning bolts ever 30 seconds or so and the thunder booming instantly after.

In Milan, we had a discussion about how to convert the time between lightning and thunder into distance. Peter and I knew an American conversion of one mile per second. Our Italian cousins said that the conversion was one kilometer per second. We all found it a bit funny and puzzled about how these rules came to pass.

Regardless of whether I applied the American or Italian conversion last night, the result was the storm on top of us. Miles spent the night huddled in the other room under a table. We couldn't convince him to join us all exposed in a bed.

This morning the rain and lightning and thunder have stopped. The weather report for today is more of the same, though. This handy little icon has been showing up for days now.Somehow I thought I was moving somewhere hot and sunny. And these people think that it rains where I'm from?