Renewing the Voice


Sunday, January 31, 2010

Friday Night's Perigee Moon




Anyone whom happened to see the moon Friday night, may have caught themselves taking a second glance at the illumined man in the sky, the reason being that Friday's moon was colossal.

Due to its oblong lunar orbit which brings the moon more than 250,000 miles closer to Earth, the moon appears 14 percent bigger than any full moon this year.

I was on my way to dinner when I saw the moon at Jolly Road and Timberfare Circle in Plymouth Meeting. I had to pull over, much to the delight of my girlfriend, so that I could take a photo of the titanic moon as it shown over the creek that runs between Beacon Hill Circle and Timberfare Lane.

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Saturday, July 18, 2009

The Calm After the Storm









Last night, I was having dinner with my family when someone shouted "Look outside!" I looked out the sliding door window of my kitchen to see a tar colored sky swallowing the landscape. This was at 8 p.m. but by the looks of the sky, no one could tell if it was 8 p.m. or midnight.

By about 8:10 p.m. the dark sky had somewhat subsided slowly fading to a brighter white. This was not the end however, as I kept my eyes on the horizon while I finished my meal, I suddenly saw a white mist forming in the distance.

The Pa. Turnpike is in my backyard, about 50 yards from my kitchen window. Its brown walls vanished as the mist moved closer to our home. I felt like I was in that Stephen King book/movie "The Mist."

The mist kept moving toward us until it swallowed us and the backyard became nearly impossible to see. BOOM! That was the sound of the thunder as rain fell like fireworks on our roof. By this time winds were picking up and the trees in my backyard were arching at a 90 degree angle.

My mother and I walked to the front door, opened it and saw the disaster area that had become my neighborhood: A six foot tree limb had fallen literally centimeters from my car. Up the street, I guessed because I couldn't see for sure, four or five trees had fallen on my neighbors property.

I stepped out onto my front porch and noticed my neighbors roof. The rain was bouncing about a foot-high off the roof showing a visible aura forming around the house. Then, the rain stopped.

It truely felt like some kind of hurricane had come through the neighborhood. My neighbors were walking down the sidewalks looking at the aftermath. One neighbor said that on Jolly Road a tree had fallen on a house, this was the home which I had guessed maybe four or five trees had falllen.

I grabbed my camera and hopped in my car, drove up the street and found my neighbors house which was off of Jolly Road in Plymouth Meeting. The entire family was standing outside, arms folded, heads down looking at the damage.

Incredibly, no tree had hit the house. However, a 10 foot tree had fallen on an antique tractor in the backyard. This is a family who once farmed the land that is now my enitre block, until they sold the land to Plymouth Township. That tractor had most likely been used by someones father or grandfather. The next house down, which was owned by this families mother, may have been worse. More than half of the drive way was completely covered with fallen tree limbs. The wind had piled the limbs about as high as my ribs. "Incredible," I thought. The storm had lasted no more than 20 minutes and it looked like it had been raining all day.

After snapping a few pictures, which proved to be a tough job due to the amount of light in the sky, I drove back home and typed up a few sentences which went up on our main page as breaking news. Just another night at a weekly paper right?

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