darkest before the dawn

Several weeks ago we had some fierce storms come through the Kansas City area (the entire Midwest has had more than its fair share of wet this spring) and one day the storm clouds rolled in at right around Noon. The sky was so eerily dark that I couldn't help but take a few pictures.

This one was taken inside our little covered area**--can you see that the night lights (which turn on automatically at night) have turned themselves on? At Noon. Crazy.

And this one just shows the clouds rolling in from the west a little better. Maybe the pictures don't accurately show it, but it was DARK.

And now this picture? This one of the tall buildings? Yeah. This one was taken the next week while we were in Calgary. At 10 o-clock at NIGHT. Night, people! The whole "stay light all night" things really kind of threw us off. We would be out for dinner and all start yawning and wonder what was going on and then look at our watches and realize it was past 10 p.m. It's crazy up there with all the light.
**As you can see from the picture, several of my coworkers came outside the same time I did to watch the storm clouds and marvel at the darkness. We had only been outside for a few minutes when the employees of the office right across from us all poured out of their building. They shouted across the parking lot to find out what was going on and when we told them we were just watching the storm they all went right back inside. It turns out that one of the employees had seen us all outside and assumed that we had received some secret terrible storm warning and were evacuating the building so he had run around his office and made all his coworkers evacuate as well. I'm not sure what kind of storm he was expecting where the safest thing to do would be go stand around outside, but perhaps he had a slice of irrational with his coffee that morning.