Sunday, August 19, 2007

A little tropical storm action in Oklahoma

After a rain-stormy afternoon and evening yesterday, bedtime included the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. The weather alert radio woke me up a lot around 2:30 am, I think. Not to mention the lightning and all that. I finally looked at the clock at 3. I slept off and on (more weather alerts), and when they started mentioning tornado watches in counties that sounded nearby, I gave up, got up, and checked the weather service Web site and various radars. Yep, big stuff was about to whack us, with a fierce, steady march from the west. I was tempted to turn on the TV to a local channel to see blow-by-blow (haha) details, but if I spend much time up at night I can have a horrible time getting back to sleep. I figured if a tornado is sighted in our county, the siren at the end of our block will sound. I went back to bed (and sleep, yay).

Slept for a while, and then the weather all went to heck in a handbasket. Tons of windy, lightning, and rain. At 5:30 I finally tore myself from my bed to check the upstairs windows that we usually leave open at least partway; indeed they were open about a handspan. The wind, coming through those handspan gaps, blew the door open as soon as I turned the knob! (This is a little set of French doors that open from our bedroom into an glassed-in former balcony room.) THAT, of all things, woke dear husband up a bit. I closed the windows, getting all wet from blowing rain, got myself dry, and went back to bed, closing the blinds even more so maybe I could get back to sleep despite the lightning. Dear husband was already snoozing again by then.

My boys mentioned casually this morning that there sure was a lot of lightning last night, "like all night, Mom!" I guess the nights of comforting them during thunderstorms are behind us now (sniff, sniff).

We haven't left the house today, so I don't know what the neighborhood is like... but the weather service site seemed to show our town got over five inches of rain as of 7 am, and it rained a bunch more after that. Our park was a soggy lake this morning just like it was all of June!

The weather service Web site said something about a rare and unusual event: the storm formed an eye-like feature complete with high winds around it and a deeper low pressure inside. Wow.

2 comments:

Emily said...

I'm a little late (so bad about blog browsing lately) but I thought you'd get a kick out of the fact that I just rolled out of bed that morning and didn't even check the weather, I just knew I had to get up and go to that 8:00 service. By the time I was on NW Expwy, I thought, "interstate--not a good idea in this wind" so I took the back streets over to MWC. I didn't even realize what I was driving through until later! I got a clue when I found that Soldier Creek was over its banks and almost over Midwest Boulevard. Too much excitement for a Sunday morning!

www.gabiklaf.com said...

what a sudden weather change..
your boys seem to be really brave, for they saw so much of heavy lightening and thunder storms..they always scare me.. May the Goodness surrounds us all. good luck Barbara