weather!

I extricated myself from the business of writing graduate reports and reading a graduate chapter to have an excellent dinner with dear friends in town tonight ... and emerged to heavy rain.  Yes, I knew thunderstorms were threatened; yes, there'd been one substantial downpour already ... but nothing prepared me for the drive home.  A mile into my route, the rain started to come down in earnest, and then turned into thick hail.  I turned off into a residential street before I got to the interstate, and waited it out for twenty minutes or so: this is just at the beginning.  By the time I gingerly left, there must have been three or four inches of icy pellets.

One look at I 25 was enough to make me take a side road back - which seemed like a safer option, although a little scary when overtaken (I pulled over) by a speeding ambulance, presumably heading to the interstate.  Little sign of hail by the time I got to Eldorado, though it was still raining.  And then twenty minutes later, hail here, battering against the skylights, and I hope not denting the rental car ... I hadn't been anticipating this meteorological drama.