Auntie Em!!!!

By now you have all heard about our weather event yesterday.  Thank you for your emails and FB messages of concern.  We're all fine here.  Everything happened south and east of where we are. We still had our fair share of excitement with the heavy rain, wind, hail and lightening.  I used a Sham-wow to soak up and inch of water under the driver's seat of my car.  Hmmm, I wonder if I should install a drain plug.... maybe a bilge pump!

Wonder why this type of weather always has to hit right about the time we're about to dismiss school?  We must be lucky that way, or it has to do with the where we're located.

The School District ordered us to lock down and keep the kids until parents showed up or the tornado warnings were lifted.  You know what that means?  All 550 sets of parents call the school in a 30 minute block of time.  There were those who sat out in their cars on the curb listening to the warning sirens blast, calling to ask when we were going to bring the kids out.  Those at home calling to ask if we were going to send them home walking and then those at work calling, begging us to keep them until they could come and get them.  Our policy stood until well after I left at 4:30, there were still a few kids that hadn't been picked up.  I could see the clouds beginning to break on the western horizon as I headed to my car.

When I got home Jody had cleared the floor of the 'String Store' aka old sewing room.  He'd put all the bed pillows, 5 serapes, some bottles of water,  and some packages of peanut butter crackers in one corner of the tiny room.  There was also a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, a jacket and my tennis shoes and some socks for me, how did he know that I'd be wearing a skirt and heels?  I just put my purse down in the corner near the food and water and added my laptop.  We were set for the rest of the evening.  

We still had one more little super-cell come through after I got home.  I think that was the one that sent down a bolt of lightening to the side of a co-worker/neighbor's house.  It blew out all her TVs, but didn't burn anything.  Her neighbor across the the street said that her whole roof turned blue. 

Today, it's bright and clean and fresh looking out there unless you live in Arlington, Lancaster (south of DFW), or Forney and Greenville (to the east) and a few places in between.  It's bright, but not real clean and fresh looking.  I feel so sorry for those people.

I've lived my whole life in Tornado Alley.  One of the teachers at school today asked me how I managed to keep my voice so calm when I came over the intercom to announce which child should come to the office as their parents showed up.   They said the hallways were lined with calm patient students, quietly listening to see if they were going to be the next one to COME ON DOWN!  To me it was just a rain storm.  Yeah, we had watched the amazing footage on the news earlier that afternoon, but at this point it was important for us to relay a calmness.  Even though Maria was secretly having a panic attack because her mother (here from Puerto Rico) was at her house alone.  Lourdes had to leave for a Dr. appointment at 3... she went out in the middle of it all!  Rosie had gone home ill earlier in the day.  That only left 6 of us!

We're the Office.  They expect that of us.  To me it's just another storm.  I think I've been through 5, 6 maybe 7 tornadoes, but never had my home destroyed.  We survive, we talk about it for days and then it's forgotten.   It's just one of the ways that we know that Spring has Sprung in Texas.  I sure hope we've met our quota for the year.

Just missed it!

We were within two days of breaking the record for the longest stretch of over 100F days in a row.  We made it to 40 days and had to have 42 to set the new record.

Thursday we only got up to 97, it stayed pretty cloudy most of the day.   I actually saw a copied TWEET on the weather Thursday night where someone had 'tweeted' the TV station stating that "we should be rewarded for making it 40 days."  Rewarded? Rewarded from Mother Nature?  Is it just me or was that sort of a stupid remark?  Maybe I'll think differently when we all get a quarter under our pillow.

It was back up to 103 again on Friday.  You see what we get when we start feeling entitled.  I'm just glad it wasn't 113.

Yesterday I woke up to the sound of the carbon monoxide alarm going off.  Nah, we didn't have any carbon monoxide in our house.  I knew better because we weren't burning anything in the fireplace.  If anything Jody was trying to freeze something we could hang beef in the living room it's so cold in this house.  The alarm was going off because there wasn't any electricity going through it.  It's the kind of alarm that plugs into the wall.  When there's a power failure it has a battery backup that will beep.  We'd only lost power.  It happens every week in our neighborhood, and no we weren't having rolling black outs.  Texas, at least North Texas hasn't had to do that yet.

Jody thinks that maybe the Electric Company chose 5:30 AM on a Saturday to shut down to replace something in the hood.  It came back on 2 1/2 hours later.  What we did notice besides the beeping alarm was that it was raining!  RAIN!!!!  We haven't had rain since May!

We had almost forgotten what it sounded like.  Gracie was freaked out by it.  She's still bothered by the dew on the grass this morning.  She'd gotten so used to laying in the cool green what's left of it grass early in the morning.

She'll lay all stretched out cooling her belly, thinking she's hiding in the tall grass.

It's been so dry we don't even get dew.  We had a nice slow steady rain for about 4 hours, ended up getting about 3/4 inch that washed all the dust off the leaves.  The plants were starting to look like fake trees at Garden Ridge.

So I guess that Tweeter could consider the rain a reward.  They're probably still looking for a quarter though.