Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Storm of the Century

Holy Cow. I am not kidding.

At around 230pm today, I received a text message from the weather channel for a tornado watch for my town. I had just checked the mail and needed to run errands. My husband wanted me to stay home, I wanted to drive the half hour to Walmart to go buy much needed diapers for Rose and some other necessities, like toilet paper. I *could* have gone to the grocery store down the street, but my stubborn ass just HAD to go to Walmart.

The sparkling blue sky was speckled with white and puffy clouds. I thought to myself that the tornado watch was going to pass within the hour or so that I'd be at the store. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. When we, that is to say Lily and I, were headed back home, the sky suddenly went from blue with puffy clouds to dish-water grey with giant, ominous clouds. Lightning struck. The wind was blowing well up in the 20s and even 30mph mark. But I was fine. The rain hadn't started to fall where I was. I could *see* this terrible storm, but I wasn't actually in it, until I crossed the invisible boundary line. What seemed like out of nowhere, the winds picked up, the rain poured down in torrents. The darkness had settled in, making 530 on a summer evening look like night. The windshield wipers were pumping as fast as they could, but not fast enough for me to see anything. I had to slow the car down to a crawl and put on my hazards. I still had a good 15 minutes to get into my town. As soon as I got off the ramp into town, the hailstones began to fall. Giant, golf-balls made of ice pelted me as I drove as carefully as possible home. Lily of course had to make commentary the entire way, but I don't remember much of it. I was too busy swearing at the ridiculous drivers who were going well over 40mph, passing me in this god-awful storm.

We obviously made it home okay. The car didn't suffer any hail damage, and when we made it home, I stowed it away in the garage. I was super happy that I had gotten a bug in my butt this morning to tidy up the garage. I didn't have to worry about the car. Anyway, I now leave you with a couple of pictures and videos. :)

***if you are viewing this in LJ, you will not have the pictures and videos posted. the original post is found at http://vonnieness.blogspot.com/***


3 comments:

Peggy Sue Brister said...

Those 2 storm pictures are pretty.

Unknown said...

Did you get any hail at all? It's hard to tell from the video's.

Vonnie said...

@Peggy: the storm clouds were beautiful to look at...from afar. Not fun AT ALL to drive through.

@Deena: we received golf-ball sized hail, but it only lasted for about 20 minutes. The storm was about an hour tops.