Morning in Paradise...

Morning in Paradise...  Debbie and I slept in this morning; we didn't get out of bed until after 5 am (that really is late for us!).  I let Mo'i out into the back yard at about 6 am, and just after that it started to rain.  No rain was in the forecast, so we were surprised by this.  As we were drinking our tea and coffee, there was a tremendous lightning strike a half mile or so northeast of us, followed by a house-shaking thunderclap with no reverberations.  The dogs were suddenly very still and quiet.  I think they're quite impressed by the thunder gods here :)

Around 7:15 it looked like the rain was over (the radar showed nothing), so Miki, Race, and I took off for our morning walk.  The sun was up through a notch in the Wasatch Mountains, and the sky was full of clouds.  This made for some beautiful lighting effects, which show up in some of the photos below.

The last photo shows the end of one pipe out of a wheelie line system.  I hadn't seen this before.  What I found interesting there was the “gear” that engages with the pipe connected to it to provide the means to transmit the considerable torque required to move the pipes.  The movement uphill, especially when the pipes are full of water, might require several hundred foot/pounds of torque.  I'd been wondering what kind of a joint could do that; this one will do it quite nicely.  The pipes themselves are a bit thicker than the pipes used on hand lines, presumably for the same reason (torque transmission)...