Look one way this afternoon and you got a brillant sunset, as shown in this photo by the Mayor's Office above and by Rocio Lluch, below:

Look the other way and you got an rainbow, as Rohan Krishna shows:

So those flash-flood warnings around 9:30 a.m. were for real. Sean Woods photographed a woman trapped by floodwaters on Spring Street by the Shaw's parking lot. Boston firefighters rushed to the scene to rescue her.

State Police shut 128 at Rte. 9 due to flooding. And cars were trapped by flood waters on Great Plain Avenue and Weston Road in Wellesley. Ed Grzyb reports:

No, not the Hurricane of '38. The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, at least, based on a 2006 analysis for the National Hurricane Center, which features eyewitness accounts from William Bradford of Plymouth and John Winthrop (yes, that John Winthrop) of Boston:

Jonathan Berk watched a wall cloud roll over Boston this evening.

Chris Devers watched the cloud barrel across Allston around 7:30:

Phelan Canney photographed the clouds over Boston Harbor around 4:20 p.m., about 10 minutes after Kim Kawecki looked outside:

Darrell Daniel looked up in South Boston near Dorchester this afternoon.

Some soccer players ignored the clouds at Millennium Park in West Roxbury:

The City Hall to Go Truck will be at 460 West Broadway in South Boston between 4 and 7 p.m., with workers handing out free bottles of cold water - and listening to you dispute your parking tickets and pay your excise and property taxes.

At 5, there's a free ice-cream party at the Mildred Avenue Community Center, 1 Mildred Ave. in Mattapan, featuring the Boston Police Department ice-cream truck stocked with lots of Hoodsie cups.

At 6, the truck toodles over to Gertrude Howes Park, 33 Fairland St., Roxbury, to hand out more Hoodsies to people taking free chess lessons under the park's shade trees.