Day 1448: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: thunder storm

In 2013, I made major life change, at the ripe old age of 37, and moved from Indiana to the west coast in Washington state.

It was a big change, in a number of ways, and one of the big changes was in the environment. Good-bye cornfields and cows; hello pine trees and seals!

A big climate change is the lack of thunderstorms out here. I can't say that we've ever had a thunderstorm, in the sense of an actual storm, and I think I've seen lightning here maybe three times since I moved.

In Indiana, we could have that many storms in a span of a few days. Along with tornado warnings, of course.

The storms in Indiana always brought a nice break from the heat. The temperature drop when the front moved in could be quite dramatic.

Not so out here. Here we have nice even temps that never really get above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, hence the lack of storm activity.

It's truly Pacific.

--end of five minutes--

Fun Fact: According the Merriam-Webster's dictionary, the first known use of 'pacific' in English is 1548. ¹ Explorer Ferdinand Magellan named the Pacific Ocean in 1520.² I always thought the word 'pacific' was a Spanish word that meant peaceful. Apparently not. Magellan was Portuguese, so he would have called it Pacífica or Pacífoco, depending on the gender.

A peek at the Pacific from Ocean Shores, Wash. This is where I first saw the ocean (any ocean!) back in 2013.

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^{1. Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pacific?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=jsonld}

^{2. National Ocean Service. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/pacific.html}