weird sky at night, sailor's delight....

i have seen some weird skies in my life....living in the midwest we have lots of active weather with 

thunderstorms, tornados, hail and blizzards....

but this one was about the weirdest i have ever seen.

the sky was an orangish brown and encompassed the entire western skyline.  we had just had a threatening rainstorm that actually was not as bad as the weather men were predicting but i have never seen a sky like this in michigan.  it gave the entire area a very strange yellow glow.

this was the view out of my laundry room window, the only west facing window we have in the house.  the glow was so bright that i thought that the light was on in there.  

the storm brought a much needed cooler breeze that night.

 in the east, we were graced with a rainbow that was so big,
 i didn't have a lens wide enough to capture it all....

we woke up the next morning to this...

foggy site.  

it was really quite still and peaceful.  this is the road that leads out of our neighborhood.

the yard looked very ethereal too.

what are those large vines growing outside of the garden, you ask?

why, those would be don's pumpkin vines....encroaching into the neighbor's yard to the far right....

here is a closer view....

they also grow into our vegetable garden where we have tomatoes, raspberries, strawberries, tomatillos, rhubarb and more tomatoes.  we have a separate herb garden back behind there, where the pumpkins haven't quite invaded, but they are surrounding the bed and i expect a full scale attack to occur any day now.  don also planted tons of zinnias and sunflowers in the vegetable garden, so it's kind of a jungle in there.  but, that's how he likes it and we have about 6 or 7 pumpkins going....

i will do a post on the sunflower explosion we had this year very soon!

the night view....

  and the morning view...

what a view!!!!!  weird...

so now that he's back to work.......

do you think i can get a new patio table umbrella???

when we bought this patio table set about 5 or 6 years ago, it had a really nice matching umbrella.  

somebody, ahem, 

and i'm not naming names....

left the umbrella open when we had a heavy rainstorm 

and it flew away like mary poppins.  

we searched the neighborhood (because the neighbor's son watched it fly away) high and low but think it may have flown into the large woods behind our house 

or the neighboring county.

anyhoo....

we never found it.  

our neighbor (same neighbor with said son who watched it fly away) had a garage sale and some of her friends from church brought some of their things to sell.  one of the items was a patio umbrella. 

that sort of matched our set, for 5 dollars.  

so we bought it.  

it was a real piece of crap.  

but unnamed dude was determined that it was going to work.  so he 

sewed what needed to be sewed when the rivets popped out of the spines and the rest

he duct taped....see that shiny spot above???  look closer

don't all men think that duct tape fixes anything/everything??

yesterday we opened the umbrella and 

this

was the result.  

lovely, isn't it??

well, now i'm on a quest for a new umbrella.  hopefully i can find one in gray or black or turquoise (ooh, turquoise) 

and cheap...if you can direct me to a great deal, 

i would appreciate an email or comment.  :D

have you ever seen clouds like this????

last night it was very hot and humid.

probably about 83 degrees and 100% humidity at 9:00. 

i don't think i have ever seen clouds like this 

these came up pretty fast although they didn't produce any rain or storms.  

just 9 minutes later it looked like this in the east......

then this....

 the southern side of the yard looked like this...

the color was remarkable...

back to the east it all looked very omnious...

but to the west where the sun was setting, we had this....

pretty cool, huh..

and since there was no rain, my little neighbor, evan 

and i picked some flowers for her mama...

:)