Some photos from the lightning strikes this morning that took out transformers at Octavia & Grove and at Broderick and Sacramento, as well as the aftermath. And commenter Zac points us to a great piece of audio of that boom. ALSO: A new photo sent to us from Matt Baume of a duct-taped glass ceiling at the Academy of Sciences and a big patch of wet floor, which may or may not have been connected. more ›

Excuse us if we're a little groggy -- but yeah, how about that thunder this morning! Turns out there was at least one lightning strike (that enormous boom everyone near downtown heard around 8:30) to a transformer near Grove and Octavia, causing a power outage. SF Appeal has a tipster who notes another transformer hit at California and Broderick causing folks in Pacific Heights to lose power. The Mercury News (the Chron is still hungover and sleeping it off) reports that the earliest outage affected 36,000 homes, and power remains out for about 500 homes. The thunderstorm, which was mostly a "dry lightning" storm but we saw some rain here, caused a few grass fires up north too. P.S. If it hadn't been for catching the weather last night, and it being September 12th, we totally would have leaped out of bed in terrorist attack mode. more ›

In the topsy-turvy, globally warmed San Francisco we seem to be living in, all rules about the rain ending in May are apparently out the window. There were some sizable handfuls of rain being thrown on us Tuesday night, and today there's a 40% chance of *thunderstorms*. While this is good news for the drought-conscious (we think we're still only at 75% of the average precipitation but we don't know how to read this Executive Summary from the Dept. of Water Resources), and for the storm-revelers, for the rest of us it's just a pisser. The rest of the weekend promises to be partly sunny, with typical June highs in the low 60s. Thus ends our weather whining for at least a week. more ›