It's the end of the world as we know it...

It's been hot here the past few days. Not DC hot, mind you, but Basel hot (low 90s and a bit humid, but our house has no A/C so it's pretty uncomfortable). About a half-hour ago the skies turned black. Not gray, not dark...black to the point that the street lights all came on at 5:30pm even though the sun doesn't set until 9:00pm or so. It was the sort of sky where back in the States I'd thinking about where to go in the event of a tornado.

Anyway, all of a sudden an enormous din arose from one side of my building. I went to see what was happening and it turned out we were being pelted with hail. Now it may not have been the golf ball-sized or ping pong ball-sized hail that you read about in the US Midwest from time to time (which I'm always skeptical of anyway), but it also wasn't the usual pea-sized. OK, let's call it chickpea-sized. We're talking chunks of the stuff slamming into the windows, blown by a hellacious wind. It made me awfully glad my car was parked in the garage and not sitting outside, because I think I really understood for the first time how a bad hailstorm can cause damage. (There have been non-stop police and fire sirens outside since then.) Bizarro. But at least the temperature has dropped about 10 degrees celsius (20 or so degrees Fahrenheit) so the house might finally cool off...