Greetings, dearest Steemians! Wishing you all an amazing 2018, with double rainbows, extraordinary colours and natural wonder to light your lives this coming year. In honour of the spirit of the new year, I thought I'd share the sendoff which Johannesburg gave us on December 30th.

The most amazing clouds

The clouds went from brightly lit...

...to dazzling gold...

...to deep pink and salmon.

All the while the whiter cloud in the foreground played off against the showoff mammatus clouds.

With a stunning rainbow

I watched the rainbow form.

Somehow these late afternoon rainbows always "start" next to the palm tree, and this time the light obliged by lighting up the palm's crown.

You can just see the rainbow starting to form. In a few seconds, it looked like this:

Suddenly the angle of the sun, the water vapour in the sky and all the other factors that go into making a full sky rainbow with a double rainbow echo came together, and the Rainbow Symphony was in full play.

Playing around on Google, I made this admittedly amateur animation to give you some idea of how it progressed.

After a wicked hailstorm

So what caused this spectacular sky? A good old Joburg hailstorm.

This is what our garden looked like as the hailstorm was getting going.

Frankly, we got off lightly. There were parts of Joburg which got badly hammered, including a shopping centre which was originally reported to have suffered a roof collapse and two resultant fatalities, but luckily the next day it was confirmed the damage was much less severe and there were no fatalities - check out the anti-climactic story here. People who live in squatter camps are always more vulnerable as the structures they live in simply aren't strong enough to withstand the wind, rain and hail. For good measure, sometimes Mother Nature serves up a localised tornado, and wouldn't you know that she usually does this in areas with flimsy housing.

Do hailstorms, rainbows and clouds offer any lessons?

Perhaps...but I doubt it. It's easy to draw lessons looking back - to say that we know that after a period of trial like a hailstorm, there'll be sky artistry and that the beauty will uplift us. Frankly, when it's hailing like that, I'm thinking "Please don't dent my car...please don't dent my car...."

It's only afterwards as I watch the golden light begin to infuse the air and turn all that was drab into warm-hued artworks that I realise if we scamper upstairs we might be treated to a rainbow. This time we got more than a rainbow; we got clouds which could have graced a Renaissance painting.

My lesson?

I managed to give myself tennis elbow in December. It's playing havoc with simple things like lifting a mug of tea (or worse, a bottle of wine) and I get little crosses in my eyes and see Tweetie birds when I shake someone's hand - not to mention typing on a keyboard is a really dumb thing to do as it aggravates the condition badly.

Is tennis elbow my hailstorm? Will I get rainbows and Renaissance clouds once it heals?

I don't know the answer either. Stay tuned!