January Tornados

Keith called me from home late afternoon Sunday as I was coming home from picking up Keri Lynn from choir practice.

"Umm, how far away are you?"

"On my way home. Why?"

"Weather's not good. Make your way home as soon as you can."

I looked out the window and just saw a lot of murky weather. Everything was calm and quiet, but warmer than it should have been for that time of evening, which started making me feel a little nervous. Still, we got home just fine and tuned into the weather channel. The front was coming our way.

We're too far from town to hear any tornado warning sirens, but the local news and weather channel was extremely accurate about when to take ourselves down to the basement. It turns out that there was a F-2 tornado that touched down for about four minutes somewhere northeast of us. It was enough time to completely demolish one house and tear down lots of trees, sheds, detached garages and such.

I'd still pick tornadoes over earthquakes any day. At least there's a little warning. Maybe not too much at all in some cases, but some.

We hung out in our basement under the staircase and decided we should probably get a first-aid kit packed down there, along with blankets and water, and maybe some chairs to make us all a little more comfortable. We went down to the basement twice for about 15 minutes at a time before the storm blew over.

The kids were kind of jittery, but we explained to them that we were just being careful. Kody thought it was all great fun that we were all joining him in the basement where he ends up being placed at mealtimes.

Now that the storm has passed, the weather has turned a lot colder. All of a sudden, we're all wearing jackets again. The kids are going outside with long pants and shoes instead of shorts and bare feet (except Konner, of course). It's been so warm for the last two weeks that the flowers were starting to bloom and people were getting hay fever. Now, maybe plants and trees will close up again as we go back to winter.

A good freeze would be nice, too, to keep down the mosquito population in the summer. But only for a week. We'll see.