My version of Storm Stories. ;)

I don't think I ever wrote about what happened here as the storms passed over.

Wednesday evening, there was a chance of storms, but when we left the house at 5pm, there wasn't anything on the radar that I noticed. Choir practice lasted until shortly after 8:30pm, and we began our drive back home. I noticed occasional flashes of lightning in the northwest, but didn't worry too much about it. As I drove home, I turned on the XM emergency alert channel on the radio to see if there were any warnings. After listening to them for 5 minutes, all I learned was that there were "tornado watches for the southern plains." Well, that's not too helpful, really.

In the meantime as we drove towards home, the lightning became brighter and closer every minute! It also began to flash constantly, with only a few seconds break between flashes. I mentioned to my mom that I didn't like seeing increasing lightning in a storm because often tornadic storms will do that right before producing a tornado! We still didn't worry too much because after all, the marvelous technology of XM radio hadn't said there were any warnings. :)

When we got home, I immediately pulled the car into the garage. By this time, the lightning was pretty scary because it was directly overhead and constant! I ran inside and looked at the radar, while my mom turned on the TV. She called out that there was a tornado warning, and at that moment I saw the hook echo on the huge storm. YIKES! I turned off the computer immediately and we began cleaning out the coat closet for shelter. (If you haven't seen it, our coat closet is about 3 feet by 4 feet. Not much space for 3 people! But it's the only interior room in our house.)

The TV was lit up with warnings on the maps, and the weather men were excitedly talking about how bad this situation was. I got out my camera and took a video of the TV screen and the giant hook-echo'd storm that was coming straight for us. (with at least 2 confirmed funnel clouds!) Right about 9:42pm on my video, the lights went out!

So here we were, sitting in the pitch black house, with a hook echo coming straight for us. I stupidly hadn't thought of it before when we had lights, but now that we were in the dark about everything, (literally!) I sent my friend a text and asked her to pray along with us. The rain started, and then a few pieces of hail started falling. They were marble-sized mostly, but we had a few loud bumps on the roof that may have been really big pieces. I wasn't about to go outside and see! We waited and waited for a blast of wind after the hail, but it never came. As we listened to a TV station on the radio, we figured that the hook echo passed less than 2 miles from our house. But there was no wind! No huge hail to break our windows! We were so thankful to God for sparing us this time, and after seeing all the terrible tree and window damage in Austin, we were even more thankful!

So that's why I don't have exciting pictures from here at home. We didn't have anything "exciting" enough to photograph!

Thanks for reading! :)