hailstorm

yesterday after work we had the most incredible weather i think i've ever seen.
the view from our balcony is of the mountains, i don't really know how many miles away... and i looked out to see that the eastern-most ones were gone, just enveloped in some kind of fog or something. you couldn't even see the streaks associated with a far off rainstorm.
fifteen minutes later, hail the size of golfballs started falling. then it wasn't so much falling as it was hurling horizontally at our balcony sliding glass door...and the wind was sucking the leaves upward. the lightening was like flashes, it was kind of like being inside a bag of microwave popcorn while it was popping. the water started to run down the hills so fast and rushing that it went up and over car wheels and completely swelled over the gutters. my ears popped from the pressure at one point. i read in the paper today that the temperature dropped to 39 degrees during the storm.
the whole thing lasted about half an hour, and it took several hours for the gutters in our townhouse complex to stop gushing water.
at 9pm we went up the hill to get ice cream, at this place called glacier that is just amazing. i had chocolate caliente, which had this slightly sweet chile smokey aftertaste, and a strawberry ice cream with balsamic vinegar in it that made the strawberry flavor so intense. as we walked up the hill, the sidewalks were covered in shredded leaves...the trees had lost a third of their leaves, and the smell of fresh cut green was incredibly strong.
the screen door on our balcony is torn, i think it's the only one of the pictures i took which came out at all.... we saved some hail in a container in our freezer...
here are some photos...

so this is out of focus, clearly (ha!), but what appears to be snow or blossoms, is actually the hail, and beyond that the gutters are flooding


from the front door of our apartment, as the intensity of the hurling hailstones had passed and we were all starting to peak out and figure out what had happened


the balcony across the courtyard from us (i'd say these are the noisemakers, but really let's not limit the rest of our neighbor's abilities to be pains in the ass)


looking down in the courtyard (the red party cup gives an excellent sense of scale, and is sooo telling of the things i hate about living in this complex!)


this is the table on our balcony, these are tiny bits of hail compared to what smacked the window and the screen so hard that it broke: