Whoa.

Instead of writing overly much about the tornado that scooted past our town night before last, I'll just show the pictures, shall I? We didn't see a funnel cloud, it was probably just over the hill, a few miles away. You could hear it, though. Not like a train as much as a moving rumble of thunder that was constant for 30 minutes or more, or the sound of the wind, loud through the window of a car as you speed along. Initially, the sound seemed to bounce from side to side, then concentrating dead ahead, then, finally, after a half an hour or so, faded quickly, closely followed by the end of the warning siren.


These first 3 are out back, looking Northwest, from where the tornado was coming. The air was terribly still and the dark grey tendrils from below the slate clouds were swirling and being rapidly sucked up into the cloud mass, like a reverse time-lapse film. Beyond erie. The only sounds were the roar of the storm a few miles away and some crying birds.





































Ah. And so all cleared up out the back. Yes. Tornado is past. All clear. Warning lifted. Satellite looks good. TV weather guy is talking about other storm cells and our county goes from orange 'tornado warning' to yellow 'tornado watch'. Kids and mother-in-law up from the basement, with pets in tow. (Mad-kitty looking decidedly disgruntled as she had been confined to her carrier and not allowed to explore the bomb shelter room in the basement that is basically a small concrete bunker, where we store packaged foods, water, and wine. So it's a combination bomb shelter/wine cellar. Yes. We keep a cork screw along with the can opener and paper plates and plastic cups. If the world ends, we're going in style, baby.)

Molly needs to go out the front to pee. Look at the clouds that greeted us out the front door. The pictures just don't do justice.

Dead ahead, to the South:






And to the East, well, there were these two huge rolling clouds, the one on the left turning clockwise, the one on the right turning counterclockwise, barreling right into each other. Above our house. Yikes:





I mean, these were monsters:




Fortunately for us, they were monsters that were headed off to points elsewhere.

The skies cleared, this time for good. We finally got the kids to bed and curled up ourselves, still a bit buzzed from it all.

And then we went to sleep. The next morning, we heard there were somewhere in the vicinity of 2 dozen tornados that went through the state and that 20 houses in Columbia County (a few counties over) were severely damaged from the worst of them. I feel somewhat guilty about being so thrilled by the cool-factor of the storm, but I guess, since there's nothing that I can do to control such things, might as well enjoy what you can out of life.

And remember that the next time could be yours to lose a roof, or worse.