Wild Weather

***You can read about some of the storm's aftermath by clicking this link or this link
***
The weather radio went off again around 1am to tell us about a tornado watch. Seriously, I didn't need to get up at 1am for a tornado watch. I head back to bed. Some time later (I think around 1:30am (I could be wrong...it could have been later), it goes off again. I'm pretty sure I would have slept through it if Mike hadn't woken me up. I go downstairs and see that it says Severe Thunderstorm Warning. I shut off the alarm, unplug it, head back upstairs (with the radio so I don't have to go back downstairs if it goes off again), plug it in by the bed and cover it with a pillow. I think it's about this time that Mike takes the dog out. He tells me that the power had gone out. Then, he flips on the bedroom light and tells me what time it is so that I can reset my alarm clock (we each have our own). I notice that there's a lot of lightning and think, "I should take a look outside." The next thing I know, it's 6:55am.

I come downstairs to make the kids breakfast and turn on the TV. Our local guys are covering the aftermath of all of the storms. The damage just to our north is incredible. I look at the weather blog and see that we got hit with a massive storm around 2am. The one I slept through. Apparently, the winds in this storm were the same as a category 1 hurricane (70mph winds). I guess there was a huge bow echo which explains the high winds. Wow. It's awesome that there seems to be no damage in our area...even Hannah's bike (which was accidentally left out during all of this) was sill in the exact same spot as it was yesterday.

The kids are still talking about the storms last night. They, too, slept through the overnight storm but were shaken by the tornado warnings from the evening. Hannah keeps asking if we're going to have a tornado today. Poor baby. Unfortunately, it's a reminder that we do live in Tornado Alley.

We ended up with just under 2" of rain yesterday. That's a lot of rain for less than 12 hours. Luckily, the backyard's not flooded too much. Our neighbor has a bare spot in his yard with a big puddle in it. The birds are loving that as a birdbath. Hopefully we'll have some calm weather for a while