Thursday, May 15, 2008

it was a mess of a night!

i am cooking dinner, half way listening to the 5 oclock news in the background.
the evening weather report comes on and i take a minute away from the homemade mac and cheese i was stirring to pay attention.
a tornado warning is up for a county several hours away from us. looks like we're in for a rough night i think to myself. i notice on the radar that the storm is of course moving west, which means it will pass thru another county, and then into the county where my parents, sister, and in laws all live.
and then of course to us.

i call my mom."mason's under a tornado warning" she murmers an agreement and says "i'm sure it won't be long before we are too."
"Yeah i know. i just wanted to make sure you were keeping your eye on the weather. i knew it was supposed to storm sometime, i was just hoping for a nice soaking rain."

we hang up and i continue with dinner.
we eat.
i clean up the dishes. TJ starts his school work. i put teege in the tub. our evening is going on as normal.

as i'm preprairing the bedtime bottle the weather man breaks in to whatever TJ is watching on tv and broadcasts about a tornado in the vacinity of his dad's ranch.

he picks up the phone to call his grama.

she lives in a mobil home.

no answer.

"call her cell. she always has it on her."

we got hold of her. she was up in the rock house. on their farm there is the mobil home, the rent house which is an old farm house, and the rock house. the sturdiest building on the whole place.
grama is up there with her daughter in law and one of the boys.

they said it was hailing like crazy. no rain. just crazy hail and wind.

i called dad when he got off the phone.

"are ya'll in the closet?"
"what?"
"ya'll are under a tornado warning.did you get in the closet yet?"

"no.we are?i guess i better check the weather...."
dad always watched the weather. either he was pulling my chain or he truely had no idea what was going on. "let me go out here and see what i can see. it's not even raining. oh, the nieghbors are all congergated out here in the street. i guess i better see what's going on."
i hear him discussing the weather with some of the other neighbors and then "wwhhhhoooo that was close. time to go inside."
it was a strike of lightening and a clap of thunder all at the same time.
he went inside and looked at the tv, which was on the whole time i was talking to him so he had to know to some extent what was about to happen.
we ended our conversation with something like "i just wanted to make sure ya'll had your eye on the storm."
he replied with "ya'll be safe." and then " do you know what closet to get in if you need a place to go?"
i went over the drill with him of "what to do in bad weather in your house". just like he taught me. just like he did with us when we were kids. shutting off all the doors to the hall way and hunkering down in the dark til things calmed down.(i had forgotten all about this until big sis(shades) posted it on her blog). the only thing is that i could never pretend to be scared b/c i was already always too scared!

i told my dad i loved him and i call later.

TJ is watching the news intently now as i hang up the phone. i am clinging to baby teege like he was some kind of life line. not willing to put him to bed but knowing full well that we still had an hour before anything major happened.

" i need to call jackie"
he looks at me like i'm crazy."are they going to spend the night??!!!"

"no. i'm sure they'll just stay til dan gets home. he's at work. besides,they don't have a safe place babe. every room in their house is either full of windows or on an outside wall. she'll call all freaked out if i don't call now."

i called. told her to gather some things and come on before it started raining.
she was already nervouse.
she packed them a back pack of things that might help keep her 8 year old calm and entertained until it was truely time to be afraid.

not that i wasn't already shaking in my boots.

while i am on the phone with her TJ goes out to the garage. he comes back with his cavalar and vest. no doubt to stash in the closet, that way we'd have something on our heads if the roof blows off.
after i managed to lay teege in his crib and close his door i follow TJ's e xample,gathering up bottles and water and formula, extra diapers and wipes. TJ found this humorus. "i don't think we need to worry that much."
"i'd rather have it and not need it" was all's i managed to retort. if he tought we might need his cavalar then i wanted to make sure we had suppies in case - you know - we got trapped or something.

the neighbors are here now. TJ heads outside as the phone rings.
it's my mom. calling to tell me that despite how scary the weather man makes this storm sound it's really not that bad. it rains really hard and the wind blows really bad and it hails like mad and then it's over. however the part of the storm that is most likely to produce a tornado, that already gad rotating cloud activity in it was the part that was headed straight for us.

TJ calls me outside to standout on the poarch and look at the sky. he's talking about how he doens't like it that the wind is blowing in to us from behind, and the clouds are moving towards us form in front. he wants me to looke at the lightening with him.
the wind is crazy blowing in all directions!
i tugg on his arm."can we please go inside?"

my neighbor is standing on the poarch with us laughing. "what is it with men and having to stand outside in the middle of a storm like this? my husband would be donig the same thing if he were home!"

TJ says "i'll go in when it starts to rain"

so i retreat to the comfort of my living room and sneak a peak at my neighbors kid playing his gameboy on my couch. "are you in need of an adult beverage to calm the nerves?"
she nods eagerly at me and we ransack the fridge and find a bottle of pinot grigio(or however you spell it) and some beer.

we each take a beer and try and settle in to a game of Mad Gab to pass the time.
it didn't work. we couldn't concentrate.
the wind is really picking up.

teege stirs in his crib but stays asleep. part of me was hoping he'd just wake up.

the wind blows so hard the windows sound like they are popping. TJ is standing just inside the front door watching the rain pour from the sky. i see the patio chair go flying all the way to the other end of the poarch. ( i didn't think to move that.)

"close the door" i beg.

TJ closes the door and turns the deadbolt only to unlock and throw the door back open to look at the hail.
he opens the screen to pluck a piece of ice from the patio."got any hail?!" he smiles at me.
it's about the size of a nickel and several times a thick.
TJ continues to flit from front door to back door peaking out the windows, opening and closing the doors against the rain. he is making me crazy!

i am stationed between the living room and the door way to teege's room. not managing to oonch more than a few feet from his door at a time. just in case we have to make a run for it.
i eventually moved him in to the bassinet in our room for some reason...it made me feel better having him in there rather than his own room.
we stood around the living room watching the weather. there wasn't even a regular evening program showing. it wasn't even regular news time. the weather men were just on our tv, continuously. this continued for a while. it seemd that my neighbors little boy was the only one who was calm enough to sit and play. us adults stood around like idiots, watiting.

this continued for a while.

the weather men had been tracking this storm for a few hours before it got to us. and as this storm ended, all of us intact, not so much as a broken tree branch on our lawn anywhere, and no we never had to set foot in the closet, there were 2 more waves of storms after that one.

the neighbors left after the first wave of storms and the next one came within the next hour.

we fell asleep sometime in the mids of storm #2.i never heard anything from storm #3 which was bigger than the 2nd but not as bad as the first. and we woke up this morning, all in tact. a few blinking clocks thru out the house the only evedience that it had stormed at all.

2 comments:

Cupcake Blonde said...

This is so scary, I don't blame you for being freaked out. Storms scare me because they are so unpredictable. I am so glad you are all okay.

jellybean said...

me too!
i don't mind a little rain shower here and there and some nice low rumbles of thunder now and then.
but you can have the high winds and the hail and the lightening!
i manage fine without them.