Auntie Em! Auntie Em!

So, this post was supposed to be about Kellen's doctor's appointment and his four shots he was scheduled to get, but Medicaid has yet to send us his paperwork, so he managed to get out of the shots. Lucky little monster.
As we drove home from town, this is what we were driving into:
Okay. A Big Storm. And it was coming fast. One thing about living on the prairie is that you can see the fronts move in across the land.

Baby and I booked it to the house, where I unloaded and called Patrick, who had gotten home about 10 minutes before us, to come out to look at the sky. About half an hour after we got in the house, the skies opened. The house shook, water was coming in through the (closed) windows, hail was smashing everything green into the ground and the wind was getting stronger and stronger. We called the dogs in, who immediately fell asleep in the laundry room, and the cats took advantage of the momentarily opened door to come streaking in, where they sat on the couch in the den and yowled for about 20 minutes straight. Okay, everyone is inside and safe. Then, click. Power down. We lost power.

Not a big deal, we expected that to happen, we keep a million candles on hand just in case. We lit several candles and then settled in. Patrick grabbed the camera and stood on the back porch watching the storm, while Kellen and I stood in the kitchen watching the storm through the kitchen window. As we stood there, amazed at the hail and wondering if the power was going to stay out for long, the barbecue grill lifted up off the ground and flew horizontally to smash into the back fence. At that point, I decided that maybe standing by a window wasn't a good idea. Kellen and I spent the rest of the storm in the hall bathroom.
The rain and wind finally died down about 2 hours after they started and we went out to survey the damage.

The lemon tree lost all of it's blossoms and had it's leaves chewed up and all of the plants on the porch looked like someone had taken a weedwhacker to them.
One of the trees in the front split in half.
There was water everywhere in the pasture. We looked at the rain gauge the next day and we ended up getting 4 inches of rain.


Of course, the dogs loved it. Schatzi and Klaus thought God had created a private lake just for them, complete with birds to chase!

We're very glad we didn't have any serious damage and God knows we needed the rain. We found out late that night (from the electric company) that there had been a small tornado on our road a few miles down. One of our neighbors lost half of their garage roof and got a free fence-cleaning from the sand blowing around, but that's the extent of the damage. Hopefully the next time it rains it will come without the hail and wind!