If You Don't Like The Weather...

... just wait a minute. Of course, in that minute, lots of things can happen. This is what the landscape in back of me looked like when I started photographing some flowers.


Ominous, but not too bad, right? The wind was picking up in nifty little gusts that made photographing the flowers a matter of 1)wait, 2) time wind gust, 3) push button on digital camera, 4) wait for delayed reaction, and 5) hope I got the shot. A few sprinkles started, but whether they were from the clouds or if the wind pushed water from a neighbor's sprinkler over, I wasn't sure. Being an optimist, I voted sprinkler, and looked through the lens to take this:


A gust of wind almost pushed me over, and made the flowers whip wildly. I unglued my eye from the camera, and looked up to see the trees almost bent double as another lovely 60mph gust of Wyoming wind roared by. I tried to photograph the trees, but by the time I took a picture, the trees had bounced back. For the moment.


Across the field I could see a wall of rain, dust, and debris hurtling towards me. That group of trees in the back of the picture vanished, the trees bent sideways again, someone's styrofoam picnic cooler kept up with the birds hightailing it to the safety of the pines. This is one time I'm glad I wear glasses, as a face full of gravel is not a pleasant sensation. I ran for the house before the next gust knocked me into the siding.

After all the tree-whipping, leave-stripping blasts of wind, the rain was a disappointment. It moved over so quickly it hardly got the ground wet. Even so, I much prefer the hit and run storms to some of the lightning show spectaculars we get around here. So, no lightning, no thunder, no tornado, and only a few flowers shredded by the wind. All in all, a good afternoon...