Good Morning!

Guess what we woke up to this AM?

Girlie Bear was crying and gnashing her teeth because school wasn't cancelled.  Boo has been jumping up and down to go out and roll in it.  The dogs got a chance to run around for a bit when I let them out, but they were more than happy to come in and lay down on their blankets.  Of course, I put the snow shovels away before the big storm on Friday so they didn't turn into flying scythes, but it should melt off as soon as the sun comes up.

I'm not looking forward to the commute, but it's always funny to watch the locals deal with White Death.  I think this might be the most snow we've gotten all winter, so they may be thinking this must be the end of days.

Had a bit of a storm

Well, I won't need to water the garden tonight.  We had a very fast, quite violent rain and wind storm come through a couple hours ago.

Here's a couple shots of the cloud wall as it approached us:

About 10 minutes after I took those, it got dark as night and the wind started blowing hard enough to make our 60 year old maple trees bend about 1/3 over, and our fruit trees were pretty much bent in half.  Luckily none of our trees lost more than some dead wood.  I'd hate to have to replace fruit trees now that ours are producing, and a big maple does nothing but break things when it falls.

Our neighbors weren't quite so lucky:

That's an 80 to 100 foot tall pine tree with a base of between 3 and 4 feet.  It missed the power lines by a few feet, which is lucky for us.  I checked out the part that broke, and it wasn't rotten at all.  The tree just gave out under the wind.

After the storm passed, I went down the road to the grocery to pick up some little things we need for breakfast tomorrow, and the stop lights along the main street were out until I was well into town.  For the most part people were doing the right thing and treating it as a four way stop, but there was at least one accident bad enough that they had to call a wrecker to haul off the carcass of a Toyota.  There were several large trees down in the park behind the house, but no other damage.

I'll have to do a couple minor repairs tomorrow on the rain gutter, but other than that it's just picking up some pieces of kindling in the back yard.  Guess we got lucky.

Tonight's Forecast

Dark.  Continued dark until morning, where we will see patches of light*

The weatherpeople are at it again.  They're predicting that this summer the midwest will be cooler and wetter than usual, the Mississippi valley will dry out and warm up, and the American Southwest and Central Rocky Mountain regions will burn to the ground.

I would hate to be a weathercritter in the United States right now.   The weather has been bipolar this year.  In Louisville we've had a very wet spring, with hot weather thrown in intermittently just to make the humidity noticeable, then it cooled off, and now it's in the 90's.  Friday I wore a sweatshirt to go to the range, and yesterday I had to stop and get a cold bottle of Gatorade on the way home to replenish fluids and electrolytes (Hooray for trucks with no air conditioning!).

While relief from the heat over what is normally a hot and muggy ordeal will be nice, cool and wet weather is not good for corn, wheat, and soybeans that are trying to grow in fields that are already waterlogged.  As much as I'd like to have another cool summer like we had two years ago, I'd prefer that the crops that have made it into the ground have good conditions to grow in.  I'm already preparing to pay $5 for a loaf of bread because of bad monetary policy.  Those prices don't need help from a true grain shortage.


*With apologies to George Carlin

My Day So Far

04:45:00 - Lights in bedroom snap on.  Irish Woman yells "There's a tornado warning!"  Adrenaline takes over. 
04:45:05 - I pull on my clothes, wake up Girlie Bear, and tell her to get downstairs in the study with her bugout bag. 
04:45:30 - Girlie Bear is downstairs in the study with her BOB.  I am taking BooBoo out of his bed to take him downstairs.
04:46:00 - At the top of the stairs with BooBoo, I walk past the back door and notice that no warning sirens are going off.  We are exactly 300 yards as the crow flies from the siren.
04:48:00 - BooBoo is safely downstairs, still asleep.  Girlie Bear is still a little freaked, but is reading a novel.  Irish Woman is running through the house looking for things to pitch into the basement so they will survive the coming maelstrom. 
04:48:30 - Turn the television to our preferred local station.  The head weatherman, who normally works during the afternoon and early evening, is talking almost gleefully about the tornadoes in the area.  I now know why the sirens are not going off.  The funnel clouds and reported tornado touchdown are in the next county over.  To put that in definite terms, the closest any of the twisters come to our home is 20 miles.
04:50:00 - After reminding myself how much I love my wife, and what a wonderful life partner and mother to my children she is, and how fortunate I am to have her in my life, I 'calmly' inform Irish Woman that we are OK.  She comes in, sheepishly watches the weathercritter for a few moments, then admits that she may have overreacted. 
05:00:00 - The kids are back in bed. I am wired from the adrenaline rush, but can tell I'm going to crash at some point. Irish Woman is walking around clucking about how it's a good thing she moved out to the couch last night when I started snoring, or we could all be dead in our beds from a tornado.
05:15:00 - ZZZZZZZZZZZ

Since then, other than school being delayed a couple of hours because of a safety concern of sending school buses out in high winds, it's been a pretty standard Monday morning.  I'm going to chalk this up as a drill, and make adjustments accordingly.