Stormy Weather!

Eek! I've never been so scared in my life! Tornado warning was sounded before 4 p.m. today and then the damn sirens went off! I'd been out cutting the grass in the mondo overgrown backyard and ran out of gas after an hour - not even half done yet! I was waiting for the lawn mower to cool down before putting in more gasoline when all hell broke loose weather wise! So, I put the lawn mower in the garage and run inside and put on the radio, and they're telling me to GET DOWN INTO THE BASEMENT THIS INSTANT, YOU STUPID WOMAN! So, I go down into the basement - after I sweep the stairs (don't want to be sitting in ick). Stay there all of 2 minutes, maybe less. Curiosity killed the cat - now I understand that saying completely! I won't go into all of the gory details of the past 2.5 hours. I ran around and around and around the kitchen and dinette cleaning up stacks of papers and putting away the knife block and utensils attached to the wall on racks (LOL!), piles of research, checkbooks - and I stuffed my high blood pressure medication into a plastic bag and tied it to a loop in my jeans! Suffice to say I tried to take photos of the flooding in the road out front and in my back yard - thank Goddess my house is built on a small rise! Unfortunately, they didn't turn out - I'm just not skilled enough with this camera. I tried to take them through the screens and pouring rain and all I ended up with was a big blur! We got about 4 inches of rain - it slacked off for all of 5 minutes, now it's deluge time again and I expect a flooded basement soon, because the sump pump, the super-duper model I had my brother-in-law Fred install in 1993 after I got flooded-out the first time, won't be able to keep up. We had this kind of weather system at the end of June/beginning of July, 1996 and I had a flooded basement again. Power never went out mind you, the pump just couldn't keep up with the thousands of gallons of water gushing into the pit. We are now in something call "back storms?" Well, something like that - although the "super-cell" that spawned the earlier tornadoes has now blown out over Lake Michigan toward the east, the weather system has redeveloped to the west and is blowing this way. More lightning, more thunder, "white" rain - it's raining so hard I can't see anything outside except white. I hope the water level doesn't rise another five feet, I'll be flooded on my first floor if it does. The basement - probably a lost cause...

Tornado!

Our January thaw as struck with a vengence!

The temperature got up to 63 degrees today and with the rain that came along, what was left of the snow cover after this warm weekend has almost disappeared.

While I was at the office today, blissfully unaware of the fierce storms outside, at least one tornado hit in Kenosha County this afternoon and high winds and strong thunderstorms rolled through the area. The weather folks are calling this a once in 100 years event (except we had one in January in 1967). Right now things have calmed down, although the walk home from the bus tonight was a bit spooky. When I got off the bus it wasn't raining; I stopped at the supermarket; loaded down with two bags of groceries, of course it started raining when I was half-way across the large parking lot headed toward the street corner. Then it stopped. Then it started. Then it stopped again. Then it poured for about 1 second. Then it stopped. And so on and so on all the way home (9 blocks plus a bit once I hit the corner). Looking up, I could see areas of clear sky, and flashes of lightning, in between bursts of rain. A few minutes ago, it was pouring outside, now it has subsided again.

There were no tornadoes around here and I saw no evidence of wind damage on the walk home tonight, but Kenosha County and other counties to the west got hammered. The main worry here is flooding - and the fog. Yesterday there were two fatalities in the Madison area in two separate pile-ups on the highway "caused" by thick fog. Even as I was walking home I could see the ground fog rising due to the temperature differential.