Most of the time it was probably real bad being stuck down in a dungeon.
But some days, when there was a bad storm outside,
you'd look out your little window and think, "Boy, I'm glad I'm not out in that."
~ Jack Handy's "Deep Thoughts" (from Saturday Night Live) :-)
The weather has sure made for a rather savage spring in a lot of places around the country and the world, including our little corner of it! As I mentioned in my last SkyWatch post, our weather last week was turbulent and often violent. We had a series of storms, each one noteworthy for an extreme version of a weather phenom: lightning, rain, hail, and wind. Here's a recap of what dominated local news and conversations this week (along with the awful fire in Colorado Springs)...
The series of wild storms began last Friday night, with the thunderstorm I mentioned in my Post-Yard Sale Fiesta post. I didn't get any photos, but for those of us unable to sleep through the meteorological equivalent of a night of nuclear detonations in our back yard, the intensity and frequency of the lightning and the eardrum-bursting volume of the thunder was the hot topic Saturday morning!
After a chilly, gusty Saturday, a warm and lovely Sunday, and another very gusty day Monday, an uncomfortably muggy (for this usually dry climate) Tuesday brought more notable weather. We were under such dire severe thunderstorm warnings that afternoon that I grabbed my camera and photographed some flowers I'd admired on my walk with the dogs that morning, figuring they wouldn't survive the predicted weather...
Pretty Poppies
(I saw these again on Sunday - the spunky red ones took a lethal beating,
while the dainty-hued pink ones were totally unscathed! Just goes to show...)
Not sure what this is called - snowball bush? - but they're quite popular here
and this is the most impressive one I've seen. I also saw it again on Sunday,
and though it had a carpet of white petals beneath it, it was still loaded with blossoms.
And then the scary monster arrived...
...turning the sky darker than I've ever seen daytime skies turn when not experiencing a total solar eclipse, and bringing more 60mph wind gusts, an impressive amount of pea and dime-sized hail, and torrential rain that caused flash floods. Here's a quick bit of the local coverage with a couple of photos, and here are a couple of videos I shot through two upstairs windows, mostly for the sound of the hail, which I thought was pretty impressive (having no idea what Thursday would have in store!)...
But after every storm comes the calm. So here is Mr. Peabody, one of our resident pheasants (we call all male pheasants "Mr. Peabody") in our next door neighbor's back yard after the rain and hail stopped, apparently come calling to discuss the storm with his pelican friends. ;-) Despite their stony expressions (*snork*), I think the pelicans probably enjoyed it a lot more than Mr. Peabody did...
Someone told me our rain amount of more than an inch in 15 minutes made the national news. I can't verify that, but at our house the rain came down in blinding sheets for about 20 minutes and, as you can see, filled our rain gauge with 1.6" of water, while the Weather Channel reported a total of just under 2½ inches of precipitation for that day (which would have included some more rain that fell that night)...
Too bad some of this couldn't have fallen on Colorado Springs!
Wednesday brought more thunderstorms, more gusty winds, and another ¾" of rain in our rain gauge, ho-hum. And then came Thursday.
BW stopped by the house as he usually does around 3pm, and when I greeted him at the door I noticed with alarm that the sky was absolutely black. So I got online to check for weather bulletins, and sure enough there was another severe thunderstorm bearing down on us and spotters in the direction it was coming from said it had ping-pong sized hail. I battened down the few hatches I hadn't already battened (and had left battened) on Tuesday, and hoped for the best. But though it did toss a few icy ping-pong balls at us (the half-dozen or fewer that hit our roof sounded like 2x4's dropped from an airplane!) along with more pea-sized stuff, and blew like stink (as usual) and rained hard (as usual), it only lasted a few minutes and then the sun came out and all was calm (I thought).
Not even the loud hail sounds could distract me from the unusual sight out our front window, though... the mist that rose from the hot pavement when the rain started to hit it and was then blown down the street by the gusty winds, looking like fine, blowing snow. I shot one video of it during the storm, and another after the sun came back out...
After it passed, I walked down the street and took some photos of the storm as it moved away from us (one of which was in my SkyWatch post). It was so huge, I could only fit less than half the expanse of storm cloud in my frame...
The rest of the evening was unremarkable until Robyn called me at around 6pm and asked me how bad it was at our house. "How bad what is?" I said, baffled by the question. "The damage from the ping-pong sized hail!" she answered. I told her we only got a little bit for a minute or two, and it didn't do much more than knock some little branches off our little trees, why? Turns out that hail storm cut a destructive swath through Robyn's neighborhood (where several other of our friends live) and the north end of town, while only grazing us and not affecting most of the town at all. Poor Robyn - the hail did enough damage to the shingles (and hopefully only the shingles) on their two-year old roof that it needs to be replaced, punched holes in her vinyl siding, pummeled (and probably totaled) their Honda Ridgeline, broke her fountain, cracked the main pipe from the house to their sprinkler system, dented her greenhouse panels, oblitered her flowers and veggie garden, and even knocked some of the metal leaves off her new faerie cart! :-( She said the hail was piled several inches thick against her fence.
Meanwhile, BW's boss (and many others, no doubt) also has to have his roof, including the sheathing, replaced. In addition, many trees, gardens, vehicles, and skylights in the affected part of town were damaged or destroyed, and even birds were knocked right out of the trees and nests and killed. :'-( Our friend and eye doctor Tim, whose beautifully landscaped house is right near Robyn's and so also suffered damage, normally would have had his car parked at his office in an unaffected area. But Thursday wasn't his day at all, as it was the day he goes to see patients at the VA Hospital - and the VA was right in the path of the hailstorm. He said his little car was "toast."
But no words can describe it as well as photos can... so here's more local media coverage (check out at least the first several seconds of that second video - whoa!) and here are some of the impressive photos of the hail stones and of the some of the equally impressive hail accumulation and local devastation, most of it at the north end of town.
And even after all that, the weather wasn't through with us. At about midnight, some invisible, fiendish force flipped on the wind switch and the fiercest wind I've ever heard started screaming and roaring around our house. I have no idea how hard it blew, since the airport on the other side of town, which measures the official wind speeds in Sheridan, doesn't get nearly the wind that we do up here. But they still recorded 58 mph gusts that night - I'd guess the wind gusts here were close to 70mph!
We've been enjoying beautiful weather since that final, epic fit of fury Thursday. But don't think we're not keeping a close and wary eye on the skies these days, and not just for photo ops!
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And finally in non-weather news, tomorrow is our Silver (25th) Wedding Anniversary! Our 2-week vacation in the PNW at the end of the month is our anniversary gift to ourselves, but the only silver involved (besides what's in our hair) is the color of our Highlander Hybrid we're driving out there. :-)
to us! :-)


















































