Really windy today! Sustained winds 35mph, gusts to almost 50mph. The wind is coming from the west/southwest, so lots of dust in the air. The dust is obscuring the mountains (about 15 miles east of my house, I think), and very dusty over the Salt Lake. The afternoon evening sun was just a dim orange/brown ball. As of 10pm MDT, the winds are still blowing, still in the 25-35mph range.

Last night there were thunderstorms all around here. When I went to bed at 11pm MDT, the storm was farther north. Another thunderstorm cell to the NW. And then about 430am this morning, we got a nice cell. Mostly cloud-to-cloud flashes, but there was one big cloud-to-ground strike that was so close the thunder sounded at the same time as the lightening flash. Quite loud. And then the wind came, blowing all day and into the night.

With the lightening, there were several lightening-caused fires. As I went outside tonight (at 10pm MDT), there was a definite smell of grass smoke in the air. Nothing nearby that I can tell, though. The forecast is for more wind tomorrow, then a few cool days in the low 80’s before back into the 90s next week.

The back yard had all the topsoil spread out yesterday. Most of it is still there; the back patio has a fine layer of topsoil dust. I ran the new sprinklers for a while to wet down the bare soil, but got uneven coverage due to all of the wind. Not sure if that was worth the effort, but it kept me out of trouble. Hoping to have the concrete edger guy come tomorrow, so we can get some grass sod put down, but I expect that won’t happen until next week.

We had Christine and all the grandkids over for dinner (Jared works evenings), so it was a bit noisy for a while. Joelle (oldest, 9) gets to spend the night. She’s upstairs watching Disney channel (some ‘princess’ show). I’m lucky that there is a TV downstairs also, so I was able to watch the season finale of “Burn Notice”, along with others that I have recorded. Last night was “Man vs Food” (Discovery channel), which is quite entertaining. And I found some airings of “Carson Comedy Classics” (Johnny Carson), which is still funny after all these years.

In the meantime, a bit of work on a web site redesign. Using PHP code for a lot of it, which is a good learning experience. I also did a bit of work on the FileHurl site (free file transfers at www.filehurl.com ). That site is working pretty well, although it has a problem with really large files (over 750mb) related to limits in the HTML POST command. I’ve been looking for a nice alternative, perhaps in Flash, but haven’t found one yet that will work with my 1GB test file (sent to my local server, a IIS7/ColdFusion/PHP server running on Windows Server 2008). Still looking, though.