Wasn't so bad...here anyway. Friend of a friend down in Ok. lost two young children. Thoughts are with them, then of course everyone still reeling in Mo., parts of Kansas and Mn. earlier this week.
Two were killed south of us when a tree apparently slammed through their car. That was just about the time when I was wondering if the children and I should take cover at the local fire station!
Monday night we were out late planting grass seed in the back yard. The report was that it was supposed to start raining early Tuesday. The next report was on Tuesday that it wasn't coming until 3. Well, I hung out clothes yesterday and by 3 PM the skies were still clear and blue. It was muggy but I figured the forecasters changed their mind and decided it wasn't going to storm afterall. By 3:30 I had Jeremiah on his way home stopping to pick up pizza and I had to go out to the shipping store in town to drop off a package and then to Walmart for some more allergy medicine for Rachel- poison ivy...AGAIN! But she's not got the worst of it. I do!
Anyway, we spent about 20 minutes in Walmart and we're heading up to the check out and I look out through the double doors and think surely one of them must be closed (the tinted outer one) until I didn't see it opening and people are walking through. It went from bright and sunny to dark and ominous in just 20 minutes! It was eerie. The cashier was saying that someone had said the thunder storm watch turned into a tornado warning and she didn't trust that report because if that were the case, we'd all be heading for cover.
We walked outside and most people were running for their cars with a few people nonchalantly walking in to the store. One gal in line mentioned that things sure got dark quick and probably saw a look of panic on my face. I didn't think I was that upset but I said, "I'm used to being completely oblivious about natural disasters, I'm from California!" She said, "Oh my, I always said I'd take a tornado over an earthquake any day!". My reply was, "No, it's pretty nice being blissfully unaware."
Driving home wasn't all that fun. About the time we were passing the airport a gust of wind felt like it picked the car up off the ground. About that time the announcer on the radio said the Hutchinson Airport measured a 69 mile per hour gust. And I'm thinking, "Crap, maybe we should go back to the fire station and take cover while this passes through because I am about to go through about 3 miles of nothing but a tree corridor." But along the route the school was there as was the church and if nothing else, the pastor's house...so, we knew of places.
We ate pizza and watched the news for much of the evening. Rachel was on edge because the NOAA radio kept going off and I can see how that can get old and thrown out the window after a storm or two! Rachel pulled all of her important items down in the basement-barbies, stuffed animals, blankets, nail polish, fancy shoes and tiara (you know, all the really important things). Both kids slept down there though it wasn't really necessary.
A wave of storms hit for a few hours. The first one breaking a pretty big limb off of a tree. We'll have to cut the whole tree down at some point. There was so much rain at one point you could barely see the trees 10 feet way from the window. The thunder and lightening was amazing! I thought Texas got cool storms.
But speaking of lightening and damage, our fencer (the thing that makes the electric fence electric) is toast. We even put in a lightening/surge arrester, though we were skeptical about it. It's basically nothing more than a ceramic piece that takes the energy from any lightening strike on the fence wires and grounds it by rods in the ground before it hits the fencer. Well, it didn't work obviously. I joked as we watched one bolt hit somewhere that our fencer was toast...little did I know I was right. So, we'll have to replace that.
Other than that, same ol' same ol' around here...just greener...and soggier.
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