The Storm

On Saturday evening it began to rain while we were out and about celebrating Allison's birthday. We had an early dinner and came home to relax with my parents. The kids were watching a movie and Katie went to the church to practice the organ in preparation for playing the next day. Then my dad's phone piped up with some kind of extreme weather warning, and I looked at my phone's weather app. There was a tornado warning for the eastern part of our county (which is where we are), but it looked like it was cancelled by that point. But the rain turned to hail, and I mean HAIL.

The way the wind was whipping the hail into the house was insane. We went out on the front porch (which is well sheltered from the direction of the storm) and watched the constant lightning up in the clouds. For maybe 20 minutes it was as intense as any storm I have ever experienced in my life.

When it was over we assessed the damage. The first thing I noticed was that it had pummeled the paint off of our porch.

Apparently all the houses in the neighborhood had cracks and holes in their siding. I ended up with about a dozen areas that will need to be fixed. I thought this was amusing in light of the insurance claim I had to file the previous week for the leak in the basement. But it sounds like it won't be too expensive to fix, and as far as I can tell the roof is okay (I need to go up there and look more closely, though). And the van parked outside at the church had a new dent in the door. But everyone was fine, and it was certainly an interesting thing to experience.