Last Night...

...was exciting.  A little like this, actually:

This Evening's Excitement

So... there I was... sitting under the awning enjoying a cigar and a post-evening-meal whiskey G&T in the early evening, say around 1815 1845 hours. The weather was kinda gray but not at all threatening and sitting as I was, which is to say looking off to the southwest, I was completely oblivious to the maelstrom that was sneaking up from the northeast, directly behind the RV... and me. And then it hit me, almost literally, in the form of an orange-brown sky and a particularly violent gust of wind. "Uh-oh," thinks I, and I get up and peek around the RV and see DOOM bearing down on me... and rapidly, at that. I VERY quickly jumped up, unfastened the awning deflapper closest to me, lowered the awning strut, and quick like a bunny moved to the other side of the awning to do the same. Done. I then flipped the ratchet lever to retract the awning and... the ratchet jammed. The wind howled. I fought the ratchet lever... and nothing. The awning is still half-way down and the wind is increasing in intensity.  

It was a lot like that, actually... save for the fact the awning's ratchet didn't jam this time.  I manged to set a new world's record for rapid awning roll-up in that the thing was safely furled about 22 seconds after the first unexpected wind gust hit.  The wind was a little like this:

I say a little bit because we had steady 50mph winds with gusts of 69mph in the video above; last night it was only 40mph steady wind with gusts over 50.  Still and even, it provided more than enough excitement.  Storms literally come up out of NOWHERE in the these parts.  It pays to pay attention.

Later that same evening...

Bad sky!

Bad sky too!

A faint rainbow.