Doom and gloom.

It's like I brought a little bit of Seattle back with me.

Yesterday, we had a high of 68 degrees, low gray clouds, drizzle and gentle rain off and on all day long. No thunder, no lightning. Really dark, low clouds rolled in around 7 pm, so you'd have needed headlights even if it weren't raining.

These photos really were taken at 7 pm - an hour and a half before sunset - in downtown Richmond, near where I work.

And today? A bit more traditional August rainstorms - rain so hard that you couldn't see beyond the windshield wipers, a lot more lightning and thunder, large ponds of water covering the road. Not quite up to the standard of hot summer afternoon thunderboomers, thankfully. (And, naturally, it stopped as soon as I got to the office.) Still, it was 3 inches of rain in 3 or 4 hours, so there's flash flooding around the area. These are the remnants of tropical storm Fay, so three inches of rain is a whole lot better than some areas around the country got.