Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!  I hope you have had (or are planning to have) a great day.  This year my manager Elvira took pity on me and invited me to join her family for Christmas lunch.  We had quite the traditional/Italian feast with antipasto dishes, snapper, turkey, stuffing and roast vegetables.  As we were resting from this yummy meal the hot weather became thunderstorms and we got hit with a massive hail storm- some of which were the size of golf balls.  It was pretty insane and the ground was covered in hail (a white Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere, if you will).  This kicked off a series of about four different massive thunderstorm episodes throughout the rest of the afternoon/evening with thunder, lightning, hail, torrential rain and even a tornado warning throughout Melbourne.  I've never seen anything like it before.  We watched each storm in amazement as we continued into our dessert of fruit, cheeses, pavlova and Christmas pudding.  At one point lightning struck one of the transformers on the street and the power went out with a huge explosion.  It will definitely be a day we won't soon forget.