Dusty, Deep Orange Armageddon

Last night we had a thunderstorm around one in the morning. There was lots of lightning and thunder. We gratefully received 11 mm of rain from the storm.
Boy do we need rain! Please send more rain!
The wind that followed was frightening. My Granddad, who was a keen gardener all his life, used to say that August and September brings a couple of inches of rain and 12 inches of wind. It was a beautiful way of summarizing what the wind, during these months, does to the soil. Basically it robs the soil of 10 inches of rain.

I awoke this morning to a weird orange bright glowing light, instantly I remembered those lightning strikes and when I saw the deep Fanta orange light from the bathroom window I thought "FIRE". The sky was a deep orange in all directions. The sky was unusually bright from all the refracted light, the visibility was very poor but the air contained no smoke just dust. A deep low over South Australia has sucked up the dry top soil and covered all of NSW in red dust today. It feels a bit like Armageddon.
As the sun Rose higher the sky turned from orange to brown and every now and again the sun tried to gleam through the haze. It looked more like a moon then the sun.



The experience is common for those folk in SA but it is very rare to have such a deep dust storm in NSW. The kids thought it all was very strange. I wanted to curl up and stay in bed but work beckoned.

Driving into the city today was strange, usually our car sticks out being the only dust covered car. Similar to when you take a driving holiday into another state and you become aware of that all the other cars have different coloured number plates to your car. However our dusty car today was perfectly camouflaged amongst all the other red dusty cars making their way through the orange gloom.