Woke up early to a gray, humid morning that threatened rain. Had the impulse to pull on clothes and go kill more dandelions. Did so. Very satisfying. Got an hour or so of mowing in before getting the impulse to pack it in. Three or four minutes after stopping, rain started, continuing for an hour or thereabouts. Maybe thirty minutes after that let up, darker clouds moved in, thunder and lightning started up, the wind rose, torrential rain came down, so intense that at times it looked like blizzard conditions, long waves of what resembled snow being driven before the wind.
After a while the sky lightened up, the rain tapered off, birds began singing in relief at finding themselves still alive. Within an hour, another bank of dark clouds appeared from the west, thunder started up again, and off to the north I saw what again appeared to be a blizzard drifting into the valley. Within sixty seconds whiteout conditions erased the view, rain fell around the house as if someone had turned on a cosmic faucet, at least as intense as the previous storm. Half an hour later, the sky again lightened up, birds again began spouting off at having escaped death twice in as many hours.
The wind and rain, I noticed, had forcibly removed just about all remaining fluffy dandelion sperm from the not-yet-destroyed dandelions/seed factories in areas of the lawn I hadn't gotten to before coming back inside. Bugger.
Meanwhile, a week ago I began the process of paying off the mortgage on this house. This morning I got the call that the mortgage has been officially paid off. Yee-ha! Talk about a feeling of liberation.
My first words on hearing the news: "Hot damn!" That got a giggle from the young woman on the phone.