My Southborough reports Town Meeting last night approved a $300 fine for spliff sucking - and gave the police chief the power to bring criminal charges against local pot fiends, even though she told Town Meeting she has no intention of re-criminalizing pot possession in the town.

Blue Mass. Group reminds us that today's the anniversary of the deadly Worcester Tornado of 1953.

The name's actually a bit of a misnomer, since the tornado continued down Rte. 9 to almost the Framingham line - one of its last spasms was to flatten the Fayville post office in Southborough.

Co-worker Jason Meserve went into the woods along White Bagley Road and the Sudbury Reservoir in Southborough today in search of our local bald eagle. He found him.

This photo doesn't really do justice to the bizarre thing those of us on the Rte. 9 side of our office building saw around 4 p.m. - hundreds of seagulls or terns pinwheeling above the Sudbury Reservoir. Sure, seagulls aren't that uncommon out in Southborough, but not so many, and not so many all flying in circles together. Gah, is it: DEATH FROM ABOVE? I just looked out my window: There aren't as many of them now, but the ones that are there are still flying round and round, just waiting for me to try to get to my car ...

You may have heard about the LNG tanker that overturned on the turnpike out by 495 this morning.

My office building is on the eastbound side of Rte. 9, between 495 and the Framingham turnpike entrance. Guess which road they've diverted all eastbound turnpike traffic onto? Guess which road is the ONLY way out of my office park? Gah! Somebody send over a blimp! And nobody set anything on fire here, m'kay?

The scene out my office window a few minutes ago.

Somewhere in Southborough, a transformer caught fire about 20 minutes ago. So no more rushing air from the heating system, no hum from the fluourescent lights or the refrigerators. If I get close enough to our main lunchroom, though, I first feel, then hear the throbbing from our emergency diesel generator, which is keeping all our network systems and servers up. A pity it can't be connected to our emergency lights, since every fourth one seems to be out, including the one in what was a pitchblack stairwell (until somebody propped open the fire door).

Note: Maybe two minutes after I posted the above, the power came back on. And the heating system seems to be trying to make up for lost time, because it's now about 800 degrees in my office, I'm melting.

Some nice lightning displays this afternoon, although nothing approaching the storm the other night, at least, not out in Southborough, where I took the above shot around 5:20 p.m. from my office off Rte. 9.

The commute home down Rte. 9 east was kind of weird. To the left (i.e., north), a beautiful sky with plenty of blue and these wispy, high clouds. To the right (south), dark, menacing thunderclouds, with plenty of lightning (the scene above would have been on the right had I been passing my office building at the time) and rain.