The Inmates Run the Asylum

Poor Carrie. She just experienced her first tornado warning at school without me right there to provide reassurance. Instead, I had to give her my special brand of comfort via text.

Carrie: The siren is going off.
Me: That means there's a tornado warning. Enjoy!

Carrie: Should we take shelter?
Me: You can if you want to.

They ended up making everyone take cover in the hallways. Carrie, not having logged HOURS of her life sitting in school hallways during tornado warnings, was pretty scared.

Carrie: I'm going to throw up.
Me: Your classmates would not appreciate that.
Carrie: I know but I can't help it. It touched down in Mt. Zion and is heading right for us. OMG can you check my windows?

Her windows in her room were fine and so was she. Carrie survived. She's on her way home now. She's going to tell me all about it. And I'm going to be the good friend and listen to her.

Then I'm going to remind her that I drove through a tornado once and she's going to hate me.

I'm a bad person like that.

Busy day, weather-wise.

Though I managed to cook dinner without incident, the sirens went off while we were eating dinner. Cue the scramble to shut windows, make sure all cats were accounted for, shut down computers, and try to capture a little bit of video of the storm on my crappy digital camera (I got a little vid of the hail storm earlier today).

The wind was impressive and we ended up losing another branch off of our tree. Second one in two days. Poor tree. It's suffered enough in its life (it's been hit by lightening twice and had the entire top of it blow off in a storm last year).

If there was a tornado, it went south of town, according to what was said on the police radio. "South of town" is a couple of miles away from my house.

We got a break of about an hour before the third, last, and weakest storm went through. I took some pictures of the storm clouds moving in. After the storm passed, there was still some good lightening to be seen south and east of town, so Carrie and I drove out to the vet's office and I tried to get some video of the lightening. It's like it knew I was watching. The best stuff always happened when I wasn't filming. I did catch at least one good one, though.

I know nothing about video and my digital camera isn't the best, but I'll see about possibly uploading some clips. It never would have crossed my mind to film any of the storms if dr_funbags hadn't mentioned it.

I hope you're happy with yourself, Jenn. With any luck, you'll get to see what I deal with every summer.

I really dislike early morning tornado warnings. Any time between four and eight in the morning is just inconvenient.

The sirens went off this morning at ten til six (this was after I finally managed to fall asleep sometime after three...I just could not get to sleep). I thought about not getting up, ignoring it. If a tornado hit my house, then it'd be like dying in my sleep.

But, I got up and checked Panic TV. They said that Kenney and Weldon Springs were in the path of the storm. Even though my town wasn't mentioned, I figured that since it's right in between those two places, it was in the path, too.

I put on my shoes (a tornado will not hit my house if I don't have to climb out of the rubble barefoot) and shut down my computer.

I watched the storm blow in. It was pretty intense. The lightening was nearly constant. When it finally started to rain, it came down in sheets. The wind gusts came from every direction and I had to shut every window in the house (this included physically moving Pete out of one window because apparently she didn't mind that it was raining in on her). Trees were rocking and bending. Surprisingly, there was no hail.

At the end of all things, we never lost power (though the cable went out after the worst of the storm passed) and only lost one branch off our tree in the backyard (to be fair, that tree's sustained enough damage over the years and really can't afford to lose any more branches).

I went back to bed sometime around seven this morning and was back up by ten.

I really wished that storm would have held off until the afternoon. Not only would I have been able to sleep through the night, but in my well rested state I would have enjoyed it more.