Results tagged “storms” from jsstudios.com

What seemed like a perfectly normal evening turned sour pretty fast. I've been battling with them for the past few months since they can't seem to get the details of our family plan quite right. I'm not going to get into the details here, but it's sufficient to state that they keep forgetting that we have a bulk text message plan but they consistently forget. It's time to go into the Verizon store and have a talk with them again.

Anyway I get home and open the bill. As you might expect, it's not right. It's raining outside - kinda hard, but the Jeep's in the garage. I decide that I may as well take the family out to supper and just make a short evening of it. We're headed down the road ( about a mile or so from home ) and the sound of the rain on the top ( it's a soft-top ) of the Jeep is just drowning everything out. My son, however, hears something on the radio . . .

"Dad, turn up the radio!"

So I turn up the radio. It's an interruption by your friendly neighborhood National Weather Service.

"This is an announcement from the National Weather Service. A TORNADO WARNING has been issued for residents of the following counties . . . "

My wife rolls down her window a bit and sure enough, the tornado sirens are blaring. The sound of the rain on the roof of the Jeep had blocked it out.

Needless to say, I wouldn't bee telling you this story if we weren't involved. And yes, the county in which we live ( Shawnee ) was included. As a matter of fact, the location of the tornado was ( on radar anyway ) about 20 minutes from us.

So my wife starts going ballistic. She wants me to turn around and go home - right there in the middle of the street in the pounding rain. Just turn around and go home. Well, I'm not having any of that. Uh-uh. Right down the block is Ace Hardware. So I pull in there and decide to sit it out. They tell us that we can all fit in the women's bathroom. I hang around out front and listen to the weather radio while the kids and the wife go into the restroom.

Fast forward about 20 or 30 minutes. Most of the bad weather has headed south and east of us and there's a break in the rain. I decide that the time's right to make a break for home. I can go to Verizon another day.

We're about 4 blocks from the house and the tornado sirens start going off again. I'm coming up to a stoplight and, as expected, I stop. My wife starts going all ballistic on me again.

"What the hell do you think you're doing? There's a tornado coming and you stop for a red light?" she screams at me.
"What? It's not like there's impending danger here. For all we know if ( in fact ) there is one it could be 10 miles away from us. The other night there was one clear up in northern Shawnee county at about 1 in the morning. Does that make it ok for everyone to start running red lights at the souther edge of Shawnee county?"

There's no winning that argument - so I don't bother to even pursue it. Regardless, as evidence I submit the fact that I am safe and sound writing this post. The fact that I stopped for a red light at an intersection during a tornado warning did not in any way affect the health of my family.

I even managed to take a couple shots of some nice mamata clouds after most of the heavy stuff had moved through.

There's nothing like watching the weather for hours on end. It appears as that will be the case tonight.

Apparently:

The National Weather Service is giving advance warning of a possible tornado outbreak in the Great Plains on Thursday with conditions similar to a deadly day in 1974 when 39 tornadoes touched down.

Our office manager sent us the news story yesterday. Today it's pretty much playing out in my neck of the woods - or at least to the west of us right now. Evidently we're going to our heapin' helpin' of it later on this evening.

Just for the fun of it here's a picture of the tornado that hit Kearney, NE. Somebody was in the perfect spot to get a really great picture.

My good friend and fellow shutterbug Aleah took this picture this weekend. As you can see, Kansas has been getting hit pretty hard with strong storms and torrential rain on ground that's already soaked. What's more, you can clearly see, if you look to the top right of the picture, that this storm is clearly rotating - something we don't like to see. Luckily I didn't run into anything like that during our trip home. Fortunately, we made it back in one piece from North Platte around 7pm last night.

I have discovered that Jeeps are not the most aerodynamic vehicles on the road when facing strong winds on the interstate. The better part of the drive back we faced gusty side and headwinds that made the trip a little stressful. I have a boatload of pictures I want to share with all my readers. I'll probably be posting them, one at a time for a while as I get around to cropping them down. I uploaded them to my desktop computer last night, but haven't done anything with them beyond that. After watching the Sopranos last night, I went to bed with a booming thunderstorm to serenade me in my quest for some well deserved sleep.

Every year, at about this time, along with getting the yard in shape I have to do something that absolutely terrifies me. I admit, I'm not a big, huge guy with rippling muscles and machismo that would make Chuck Norris' knees buckle, but I'm no pencil-neck geek either.

However, if there's anything that will make me run for the hills it is spiders. I hate spiders. They give me the heeby jeebys. Speaking of spiders . . . I'm glad I didn't see these really beautiful pictures of a Black Widow before I went down to clean out our storm shelter. I may not have been able to do it fearing a spider jumping on my back and sinking it's poisonous little fangs into my neck.

Because the local weather guys are anticipating some fairly strong storms tonight capable of producing hail, strong, staight-line winds, and ( quite possibly ) tornadoes, I had to put my fears aside and clean out the storm shelter. I really should have posted a picture so that a person can appreciate where I'm coming from. The storm shelter in our backyard is a concrete bunkerish kind of mini basement situated about twenty feet from our back door. It rises, just enough from beneath the ground to appear as if someone crashed a softball-looking spaceship from outer space and embedded it into out backyard such that three quarters of the ball became buried. I say spaceship because there are two aluminum vents in the top that I had to fix so that rain didn't fall into the shelter and a double-sided door about five feet long that runs from one edge to the center.

The shelter just might be large enough to accommodate two adults and two kids or two large adults. A very tall adult would probably have to bow their head even when standing in the center inside of it. A couple years ago I had to clean that thing out. There was garbage, stinking, foul water, and about an inch of some silty kind of disgusting substance covering the bottom of the floor. So, I spent a large portion of the day getting all the crap out of there and cleaning it in the event it would be needed.

Installing the vents on top has proven to keep the shelter from filling up with standing water, but the side effect is that it is a nice, cool, dry place now. So, if you know anything about spiders then you know that they are grateful for all my hard work and have moved in. So I have to take a broom down there and kick their eight-legged asses out every once in a while. Thankfully we've never had to use it. I really hate the thought of it.

Which would I rather face? The potentially 200+ mph winds and debris driven by tornadic winds or the eight-legged predator of my nightmares? It's a tough choice.

It's 8:27 in the morning and the sky outside is getting to be a dusky gray. In the Western half of the state ( as well as neighboring states ) last night they had some pretty rough weather. I guess we're going to get a bit of it today and into the night.

While I'm not particularly worried about it, my son is. Growing up I lived in several states that often carried the threat of tornadoes during the spring and early summer seasons. I don't remember ever being as afraid of them as my son. I do remember, when we moved to Utah from Nebraska, asking my teacher if they had tornadoes in Utah and she explained that they couldn't make it over the mountains around Salt Lake City.

I was pretty young so that made perfect sense.

I wish I could use that explanation for my son but he is way too smart to buy into that. Honestly, I think it is the fear of the unknown that drives his fear. He's seen the shows on the Discovery channel and the Weather Channel about how tornadoes form and the breathtaking footage of the massive destruction they can do. But he's really never seen one first hand. Last Spring, I thought it might help to take him to one of the Storm Spotter classes that are held by the National Meteorological Society and offered free of charge to the public. It was pretty informative. Even I learned a few things I did not know. However, I can't say that it helped his fears that much.

The one thing that does make them scary is the fact that they are so random. You never really know when and where they will happen. Although all kinds of radar and other scientific instruments are developed to better forecast and track the weather, there's no single way to really predict and identify them better than human eyes. Which, as anyone can figure, works best when the sun is up. So, going to bed at night during a severe thunderstorm can be pretty scary for a kid. All those blinding surges of electrical light followed by booming thunderclaps powerful enough to shake the windows and the fierce, howling winds that seemingly threaten to rip the roof off of the house even cause me to sometimes get out of bed and turn the local news station on.

These shots were taken as a thunderstorm moved through the area during sunset. As you can clearly see it made for a rather dramatic shot.

For those living in the midwestern states it's that time of year again.