WhiteRider will understand this.

So Lubbock's been without significant rain for something like six weeks, and for the past two it has rained every day in every part of the area except for our fabled town - a tiny village some twenty miles north has been hit for ten straight days and we're still draining our water supply just to keep our lawns breathing.

Today brought on a massive alert for storms. Around five, a huge thunderhead missed Lubbock's southeast side by five miles and blew silently away. An hour later, another storm traced the exact same path, only this one was larger; thing was, the bastard was horseshoe-shaped, with the outside of the horseshoe exactly the same size as Lubbock. Another, stronger cloud blew over the aforementioned village in the above paragraph some half an hour later, missing Lubbock both west and north by apporoximately one mile.

At long last, it appeared a huge T-storm would clobber our fair city about two hours ago, and on the radar the massive glowing-red-in-the-center monster rolled right to the doorstep of South Lubbock. It was moving northeast quickly, and I went outside to enjoy the oncoming storm for a while.

It never came. I waited and waited, got a little excited when the wind picked up, anticipated the coming rain from the unmistakable smell, and got nothing. Curious, I went inside and checked the radar once again.

The storm had gone from moving over 30-40 mph to a complete standstill, with the head of the storm hanging right over the southern city limits. Storm buffs know what that means - a massive gust front that'll blow away everything not tied to a post. It came, all 80+ miles per hour of it, and soon my side of Lubbock was blacking out.

This minor hurricane lasted for about thirty minutes. All the dust that blew in (there had been no rain, after all) began to grit my teeth and I started to cough (still am, as a matter of fact). The wind died down, I cooked some dinner, I took about twenty minutes trying to recover my computer, and here I am. The radar is showing the stationary storm continuing its bizarre disintegration into patches of light rain, still exactly in the same place it was before - a mile or two south of the Lubbock city limits.

Everything within a 300 mile radius of Lubbock was battered at some point today (mostly multiple times) with heavy rain and thunderstorms - everything, that is, except the few square miles of Lubbock proper, which didn't receive a drop. This is by far the strangest day of weather I've ever witnessed.