Cloud spotting & agility

As promised, round two of yesterday's severe weather blew through in late afternoon and early evening as a line of heavy duty thunderstorms rolled from west to east across our part of the state.

From our vantage point south of Cedar Rapids, we had a good view of the edge of the thunderstorm complex as it moved down from the north. This pic was taken looking northwest of our house. (That's not our house on the right, that's the hoop building.)

Here I'm looking straight north, across the oats field the Farmer has been trying to chop for about two weeks but can't because it never seems to stop raining long enough. This is a continuation of the same thunderstorm cell.

And finally, a view to the northeast that captures the leading edge of the shelf cloud. Those clouds are so cool, even if they are kinda freaky looking, like some alien spaceship hovering above the ground.

I went in the house shortly after taking this pic because the lightning really kicked up as the thunderstorm spread south to include us in its party. The lightning was intense, kinda like a strobe light at times. Who says disco is dead? I kept waiting to hear the BeeGees break into the theme from "Saturday Night Fever." (Great, now I won't be able to get THAT out of my head.)

I went inside and spent the evening storm tracking along with the TV meteorologists. Much safer. No lightning. No BeeGees.

Round three hit just as we went to bed. Jamie decided he was going to sleep on the bed so we could save him from whatever it is that scares him so badly about storms. For once, being on the bed seemed to calm him down and he did curl up and go to sleep so we let him stay. Big mistake. Then Phoenix wanted on the bed, not because he was scared of the storm, but because everyone else was on the bed and he wasn't about to stay on the floor like a common dog. So I let him come up, too. We need to get a bigger bed. 

Today Phoenix and I ran at my club's first ever summer agility trial at the QC Dog Center. It's such an awesome facility and so nice not to have to unload the equipment trailer because all the toys are already there. Instant agility trial, just add workers!

The courses were fun but trappy. Unfortunately my handling was not up to the challenge and Phoenix managed to  fall into pretty much every single one of them. He also did some spectacular free-styling. At one point, I'm not even sure we were in the same zip code.

We'll go back and try it again tomorrow. Having been allotted our one day of sunshine today, heavy rains are again forecast for tomorrow.