Writes For Chocolate: It all happened so quickly ...

I still love the heat. Nothing better than a hot summer day, I say. So on any hot summer afternoon, you can find me outside, enjoying the weather, maybe playing with my dog.

And that's what we were doing yesterday ... afternoon, maybe eveningish (that is so a word!). The sky was cloudy, maybe darkening a little. But that was in the east, and the sun was setting in the west, so that made sense, at the time. I wasn't expecting any storms, and if I was I'd be looking southwest, as that is where most of them come from. But not east, definitely not east. Not from the front yard.

But the sky continued to darken. Then the wind picked up. The neighbor's tree, on my right, nearly bent over, and suddenly the table umbrella, behind me, started to rise and float away. It took a moment for that to register, that my 9-foot umbrella was actually floating up and away from the table stand, before I grabbed it and proceeded to wrestle it to the ground, trying to fold it in as I brought it down, looking for my little toto-ish dog running around (hopefully not floating away!) so as not to bury him under it.

Yeah, that's what I did. I wrestled a 9-foot umbrella in the wind. Where's the video camera when you need one?

I paused and looked at the clouds. They fascinate me, how beautiful and mysterious, floating and swirling in the sky. One in particular, off to the east, intrigued me for a moment. Long and sinewy, stretching out of the sky, swirling and coming toward me and OHSHITGETINTHEHOUSE!!!

For some people, it takes a flash of lightning, a sudden downpour, or even the emergency siren to get them to stop appreciating the beauty of a coming storm and take shelter. A funnel cloud works for me.

Almost as soon as I got in the house and ran to a front window where I could see from a sheltered distance, the cloud was being swallowed up into the sky. Gone. As fast as it came, it went. No harm done.