Before the storm and the rest of the weekend!

So, in my last post, I shared with you, some of the strong to severe storm action we experienced in my region on Thursday night/Friday morning. One of the members of our regional storm chasing team, the Southern Weather Brigade, Mike, deployed into the area, trying to capture lightning and anything else that might "spin up" along the way. Some mesocyclonical spin-ups were being reported, and he actually deployed into a tornado warned area. In the morning (dark and early), at 5am, we were graced with a severe thunderstorm warning of our own, which didn't blare on my weather radio???, but it did come through on our phones with the county CodeRED weather warning system. I immediately jumped into action checking GR radar to see if any rotation was noted. Nope, but the size of the cell was amazing. HUGE! Well, I am telling you all this to show you what it was like before the storms broke loose in the south that night. We had a break in the cloud cover of the day, which made for an amazingly striking sunset, which I had no choice but to capture. Aside from that, we had a lovely albeit COLD weekend! On Saturday, we woke up and headed out to the pumpkin patch, where we strolled through piles of pumpkins, trying to find one that suited us perfectly. The "kids" (all of them!!) had a great time, teeth chattering and all.
After that, we headed out to the local amusement park to enjoy a fun family day of riding rides and all that goes with it. Oops... revenue hounds might want to fix that... We especially had fun in the Lorikeet feeding exhibit, where the kids had lorikeets all over them.When our fingers were sufficiently numb, we returned home for some pumpkin carving and thawing out. It was great fun carving into our chosen pumpkins and gumpkins and seeing where our imaginations carried us... We had a great time exploring our creativity and really letting the juices flow... ... and the pumpkin seeds and the guts... Mini-Dew even took to cloning... We had so much fun!!! Introducing... Dew's odd pumpkin family: It was a truly great weekend.

The high pressure system, which has firmly planted itself over the southeastern US has offered plentiful clear skies and cold, windy weather. It is nice to finally have a season change, but did we have to skip fall???

Stay warm!
~Dewdrop