When it thunders, one feels about five years old again. There is something totally viceral, totally primal about the chills that run down your spine when a clap of thunder shakes the house. Are there swirling chaotic winds blowing down off the plains of Kansas? You wonder. Is that fear I smell when a clap of thunder hits something near the house? The thunder becomes crisper and louder, and you wonder about taking cover. Raindrops clatter off the top of the chimney cap. Will Mother Nature be merciful? Or will she huff and puff and blow the house down? You feel small when the wind blows, the lightening strikes, and the hail clatters against the windows. Your reaction is not logical or sensible, but irrational and fearful as the wind grows to a roaring gale. Is the house safe? Oh, ye of little faith. Our puny homes are just a matchbox construction compared to the power and fury of a storm roaring across central Texas on its way to devastate Arkansas and Louisiana. Straight line winds, tornados, hail, torrential rain, and lightening are all the violent features of a weather phenomenon that is only too common in the month of April. We need the rain, but we would like to keep our trees. The things is these storms are not completely predictable in spite of what the weather people claim. In fact, the weather people know that they can only predict the weather within certain time parameters–the further you move out from the here and now, the less accurate their predictions are. Weather is a non-linear equation that is only predictable over an extended period of time because weather events are self-similar, but at any given moment, you might be wrong.