Wow! Strange Weather

It cleared throughout the day Tuesday, nice warm day and then socked back in just before I was to leave for work that evening. The weather channel's radar maps showed a string of severe storms stretching south and west into the American Midwest so I knew I wasn't just waiting out an isolated one. I made a dash for the car during one lull but got soaked anyway. The ride was amazing in a scary kind of way. Driving rain, more lightning & thunder, hail, roads awash in standing water and the sky had that sick greeny/purple hue to it that meant tornadoes were a possibility. I turned the stereo off cuz I wasn't able to hear it over the rain, hail & thunder. Kept an eye peeled on the underside of the clouds for any sign of funnel action. The lightning and thunder lasted until about midnight; that from about 6 p.m. and it's been raining steadily ever since. All manner of vegetation have completed their transformation into a million shades of verdant greens. Pictures to follow when we get some sunshine.

**Sidebar** My cousin BJ's parent's lost their home to a tornado back in the summer of '79. They were both in the house at the time and lived to tell about it. If memory serves there were two walls left standing from a good sized two story house. My brother happened to be in town and went down to see if he couldn't be of some sort of help. There wasn't much of anything to salvage but he came away with some incredible pictures of the damage. He has one shot of their bathtub wrapped around a tree 15 feet in the air.

This has been a strange spring. We keep getting teased with a couple of warm sunny days and then still another cold front settles in for 4 or 5 days. See-saw, back and forth - this has gone on for more than a month. Bring on the hot stuff so I can do my solar battery thing and soak it up to get me through next winter. I really should move to Texas or Arizona.