Well, tonight Cookie did not weather the storm under the bed - she was in the closet!

I was on the way home from work and started looking for a station that was playing a better song when I came across the tail end of a tornado warning - it was on the ground, in my county, but I missed where! After punching the buttons for about five minutes (and always getting the tail end) I found out it was headed straight for my house! Because of the normally heavy traffic, that is currently exacerbated by construction, it was another ten minutes before I could find a phone. I called my son and said "put the cats in the cages, get the little TV and the phone and go in my closet! But if you hear the sirens, stop looking for cats and just get in the closet!" And he said "the sirens are going off now!" So I told him to go! I told him I'd try to find a safe place to pull over.

But, of course, since the very five lives that are more important to me than my own were fixing to be blown away, I got right back on the road! I was close enough to the storm that it was starting to rain really hard and it was also very windy. Instead of getting back on the freeway, which didn't seem to be moving, I turned right to go home through the airport. The closer I got the worse it got. There was lightning hitting the ground just yards from me, hail was battering my car, and the rain was coming down in sheets so thick I couldn't even see the white line on the road! On the radio they were saying people were just stopping under the overpasses, in the false assumption that it was a safe place to be in a tornado, blocking everyone behind them from being able to go anywhere! I sure was glad I veered off through the airport. The streets were flooded, even at the top of crests it was so deep I was throwing up rooster tails! I got home just as the golfball sized hail started. The creek behind us was well over its banks.

But my house has a bad foundation, and my son had to shove the closet door closed, and it stuck. So I couldn't get in!

But since I'm the mom, I'm invincible of course, so I weathered the storm watching out my window. Eventually, it died down, and everyone came out of the closet. Alan said he heard some of the loudest thunder in his life while they were huddled in their "storm shelter"!

Here's some pics:











I hope everyone has an emergency plan in their house!