Friday, July 1, 2011

Thursday Night's Storm

Apprently we get FREAKISH weather whenever Father Charles is NOT with us!  We had crazy hail on the two nights before he joined our group and last night.....THIS rolled in!

 We were told you can see storms roll in for miles on the prairie and we certainly saw this one coming.  It still caught us off guard by how FAST it moved in.  I was outside typing yesterday's blog post and I knew it was going to rain.  By the time I finished typing, I could tell it was going to storm and wanted to get my camera.  By the time I ran in to the house and came back out, it looked like a monster was about to eat us up!
 Because the sky is so big, I could look to my left and everything was sunny and then you could see the edge of the storm and then just this black darkness.  In the minute or two I was standing there, you could see the clouds moving in an suddenly I was smacked in the face with wind.
The rain didn't even get to me before the wind started blowing around gravel and debris and we all ran for cover inside.  I had taken about 10 pictures in a row, panorama style, and was able to use photomerge on photo shop to put them all together into the picture you see below.  I swear, other than using photo shop to join them together, NOTHING was altered.  The size color and contrast are just as we saw them... only I don't think anything could capture the full extent of what we saw!


Within 5 minutes we went from the picture you see above to pitch black.  I could show you an unaltered view out our front window, but it is just BLACK.  I did bump up the brightness (quite a bit) in photo shop on the next picture so you can see the wind.

 The wind blew so hard, rain came in the closed windows on one side of the house.  The power flickered and we hung out in an interior hallway while the worst passed.  Our phones lost service for a minute or two, but when service returned we took it as a good sign that the worst was past us.  Facebook friends back home were the first to comment on our posts that they saw the storm on radar and it looked bad, but it also looked like it was past our area.  It was SO good to have even a small way to feel connected while waiting out such a big storm!
 The worst was passed, but lightning and thunder continued and we did loose power around midnight.  The kids all ended up in sleeping the living room (many rooms had water on the floor and the boy's camper just wasn't safe) so NO ONE really got much sleep.
It is about to start up again, hopefully with just a normal size storm.  Considering everything, I don't think we will be working much today.  It does look like nothing at the build site was damaged and I am kind of looking forward to a lazy rainy last day.....as long as I don't see those monster clouds rolling in!

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