Ok, so this post is about 2 weeks overdue, but, hey, I'm a slacker. Never pretended to be anything else. Anyway, I usually complain about how we don't get the "good" weather here. Being a weather geek, "good" to me equals "severe". I enjoy a good thunderstorm, there's something humbling about mother nature with a raging bout of PMS. Well, mama has really been on the rag around here lately. On April 10 a severe weather outbreak roared through our area around 4 a.m. It had been moving steadily our direction from the west since very early in the evening. We watched a supercell thunderstorm move from west of Abilene, TX (about 400 miles west of here) all the way to Oklahoma, throwing off tornadoes. However, when we went to bed, all was quiet around here.
Around 3:00 a.m. Lola, our fierce looking German Shepherd who is extremely afraid of thunderstorms, woke me up. Either her or my swiss cheese of a bladder, can't figure out which. Darling husband dutifully got up to go sleep on the couch with Lola while I went back to bed with Christian, who was in with us because thunderstorms were in the overnight forecast. I laid awake watching the lightning get closer and closer until it dawned on me that I was hearing this ringing sound. Thinking it was my ears, I didn't pay it much attention, but it kept on. So I got up and turned off the box fan that runs in my room as white noise year round. It was the city tornado siren! Christian was still asleep so I ran to the living room to ask Vangelis if it was really the siren - about this time the electricity starts blinking off and on rapidly and I'm starting to flash to "Twister" and wishing I had a cellar in the backyard. I quickly dressed in jeans and t-shirt - if I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die with my clothes ON! I'm a 44-year old mom; I will not suffer the indignity of being found dead in my underwear and a wife-beater tank top. I got Christian up and brought him into the living room. Like morons that I would make fun of if this were a tv show or movie, we're bouncing around trying to get the tv on to see what's going on. Word to the wise: the satellite dish doesn't work well when a) there are heavy thunderstorms, and b) the power is flashing off and on. The stupid HD box resets itself every time the power goes off and it takes about 45 seconds to cycle through and come back on. I'm running around trying to turn on my possessed computer, which takes about 10 minutes to cycle on depending on what sorts of things went wrong when it cycled off earlier in the day. While I'm waiting on the tv and/or computer, I'm walking around looking out the windows and hoping that whoooshing noise I hear is cars on the interstate. You know, folks getting a head start on the morning rush at 4 a.m. during a furious storm. Yeah, right.
The winds died down pretty quickly and the storm moved through. We went back to bed. Turned out we had an F1 tornado touch down here in our town with winds between 90-95 mph! In addition, we had straight lines winds close to 85-mph. There was a lot of minor damage: trees down, roof damage, trampolines pitched up on top of homes or into streets, fences torn down, but no serious injuries or devastation. But I can't believe we didn't take shelter in the bathtub and were just spinning around trying to figure out what was going on like idiots. The very next day I bought a weather radio so that I do not have to rely on the tv or computer for information. It got a good workout almost exactly a week later when another round of severe weather moved through. This came earlier in the evening, so we knew what was coming and the extent of it, but it was a good "dry run" for the weather radio.
By the way, our home suffered no damage. The neighbors behind and across from us both lost trees but we didn't so much as get a cheap metal lantern blown off our fence. The neighbors on the street behind us sit up a good 15-20 feet; our backyard at the rear has a 12-foot retaining wall and then the neighbor's 6-foot privacy fence on top of that. I think that provides us great protection from the winds. I'm always surprised that the trees in the creek area next to us aren't damaged. They are large and pretty old but usually only lose a few small branches. Nothing major.
Can't say the weather hasn't been good here lately!
