Torrid Tornadoes Tear Through Tiny Town

This past weekend was a wildy and wooly one, weather-wise. (Avidly admire all the asenine alliteration!)

OK, I'll stop.

Really, the weather was quite crappy. I take back what I said concerning the lack of rain. Aaron and I woke up Sunday morning to the sound of severe weather sirens, and assuming that Kansans probably don't fool around too much with the severe weather warnings, we bolted downstairs and hid in the pantry. With one pissed off cat.

Let me describe our pantry. It may be the safest "room" in our basement-less house during a tornado, but one thing it is NOT is large. There is barely enough room for one person, let alone two people and a small, claustrophobic, furry mammal. There's certainly not enough room for two people to sit, so one of us had to stand or squat the whole time. And Milo just tried to claw his way out.

Well, we didn't hear any "freight train" noises, and eventually we came out of our very small pantry. The power was out, but nothing really awful had seemed to have happened. So, Aaron's hungry stomach decided for us that we would drive around Lawrence and see if we could find a restaurant with power and breakfast. Neither seemed to exist, as it turned out.

All the traffic lights were out, and traffic was behaving about as well as could be expected. There were trees where they weren't supposed to be (in cars), powerlines down, transformers in the street - things were a real mess. And we couldn't get any breakfast.

Well, we went to the HyVee (grocery) down the street from our townhome, and went home to eat some bagels and cream cheese. The power came back on soon after, and everything was hunky-dory. Unfortunately, parts of Lawrence didn't fare so well. Classes were cancelled at KU on Monday because of the mess on campus - 60% of the buildings sustained damage! Ouch! We went to church at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday evening, and power was still out downtown. Plus, a number of the downtown streets were really a huge mess - there were old growth trees lying broken everywhere.

So, that was our first Lawrence, KS severe weather experience. Hopefully the whole springtime isn't quite that crazy.