How crazy is the weather lately? Monday night, we had a cracker of a storm blow through Chicago - mind you, we had actual tornadoes about a week and a half ago, but that's another story - winds clocked at over 75 miles per hour. The damage wasn't bad on the North Side where we live, but around Hyde Park and the southwest part of town it was another story completely. Old trees, solid and hale specimens two to three feet across were snapped like matchsticks across roads and walkways.

The photo above was taken outside Judd Hall at the University of Chicago this morning, and the one below about one-half mile away in Jackson Park near the Museum of Science and Industry. [Click on images to grab 1280x960 versions on Flickr] The weather folks report this was the worst Chicago storm in the past five years, but judging from the size of the felled trees this might be the worst storm in decades or longer, at least on the South Side; I've observed that weather tends to be much more extreme on the South Side than the North, overall.

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