Tornado!

This is getting annoying! My friends are calling me the natural disaster magnet. First, in 2003 we dealt with a pretty significant earthquake. Then last year in TX we had Hurricane Ike destroy our home. Now here we are in Oklahoma and what do ya think happened today?...tornadoes!!

It was interesting to say the least. I got up from naptime and was getting ready to head out to Walmart to pick up a few things when I heard some thunder. I thought to check weather.com to see if it was going to be maybe too rainy to go out and do errands. And just as I clicked on the site, the tornado siren went off. Oh CRAP...no Walmart today, this was seroius!

So I quickly read over the warnings and alerts and decided that Carter and I (and the dog) ought to head out to our storm shelter. I gathered some snacks for Carter, some water and blankets, my cell and my laptop and headed down. We got settled in and first things first...I checked my laptop for signal and WOOHOO, I was able to be online (amazing to have wi fi signal 8 ft underground)! So I was able to keep an eye on the tornado warnings and watches as they cycled thru and email to Josh in Canada so he knew we were ok. We got some SERIOUS hail from the storm, some up to the size of ping pong balls (areas around us got up to BASEBALL sized hail!). It sounded horrific pounding on the metal door of the storm shelter. It was so loud I couldn't even hear myself talk. The top two pics in the post are of the hail when I took a minute to come out and peek after the hail had stopped.

Carter had a blast while we were down there. He played on the stairs and just chattered and laughed and had a good ole time. Even when it was soooo loud he was a very happy camper. The dog was pretty unhappy, he hates the shelter and his animal instinct told him something was up...so he was pretty restless.

After about 90 minutes there was a pretty good break in the storm so I headed back into the house to turn on the news and wait for my neighbor to come over with her daughter (she had tried in between the first two cells of storm but couldn't as it was too dangerous to drive the 6 blocks). After she teased me for putting in a storm shelter last month, today she was thinking it was a good idea to come to my house to weather the storm lol (love ya, J!). Anyway, we weathered the rest of the storm in the house as the tornadoes were dissapating. By this time it was also well past time for the big monkeys to be home but I knew they were in lockdown at school. They were much safer there than in transit to home. They eventually got home at 6:30pm...over two hours past normal time...hungry and keyed up but just fine.

After I'd had time in the house to watch the news, we learned that a tornado touched down about 1.5 miles from our house...and several touched down within several miles of us. It caused serious destruction, but luckily there are no fatalities reported yet. And here's the place where I also add that after all of the back and forth that Josh and I did in deciding if we were going to put the shelter in or not...I'm VERY happy that we did. It was a definite comfort to be able to go down there and know we were safe no matter the choas that might happen above ground.

So I've had a bath and I have my feet up, trying to relax off the craziness of the day. Good grief the drama just doesn't stop lol (trying to keep some humor here tho!).

The last pic here is of Carter and my neighbor's little girl having dinner tornado style lol. They were so cute together all afternoon...just blissfully playing, having no idea of the craziness going on.