My First Sandstorm!!

People keep telling me about sand storms and they try to describe them to me but really, its just something that you have to see to believe!  Lately the weather has been sandy and dusty.  It looks like smog, but when you go outside you really can taste the sand particles.  And occasionally there is a bit of a crunch in your teeth.  It's weird.  The weather reports from weather.com look something like this:

Well today thunderstorms were predicted.  The temperature was pretty warm today.  The thermometer outside said 31 degrees when I went outside.  (This is about 87 F) It was warm but a bit windy.  I decided not to go anywhere today and I am so glad, because I would not have wanted to miss my first sandstorm!  I didn't even know it was coming! Anyway, I checked the weather after the sandstorm and this is what it said:

Notice that it said visibility 0 mi. They weren't kidding!  I went down to the compound store to get some water and shortly after I returned, I was fiddling around in my kitchen and basically the air outside the windows started turning orange.

It went from looking like this:

To this:

To this:

And then it went totally dark! As soon as I saw that something very out of the ordinary was going on I grabbed my ipod out of the docking station and ran upstairs to take pictures and of course, video.  So here is the video.  Sorry, I have no clue how to edit these things so please "bear with."

Basically, all you see is it going from red to dark.  Then it was dark for about a minute or two and then it started getting light again.  I started the second video from when it started getting light again.  The second one is about 2 minutes and it was actually much more exciting if you were actually there, but I am telling you it was the strangest thing I ever saw! (Weather wise that is... there are other things I've seen that I just don't want to talk about!)  So here is the second video hopefully.  It said something went wrong trying to upload it.  It may be to big but hopefully it works. I tried to edit it because it is kinda long.  I am not good at this.  If you see it change color suddenly, well I cut out a bit.  The whole thing took about 3 minutes.

And then, when it was over, it started to rain a little and it went back to looking like this:

Crazy I tell you! CRAZY!  And that is what happened today in Saudi Arabia!