unscathed....

as you may or may not know, omaha was hit with a freak storm on friday afternoon. it was this fast-moving monster cloud that swept though and was gone as quickly as it came.

finley and i were at home, it was almost five, and we were just waiting for matt to get home from his job in lincoln (an hour drive away). i was sewing and finley was playing in nothing but a diaper. because i'd been home all day, i was still in my pajamas or "housecoat" as my grandma might say. i heard them talking about high winds and thunderstorms coming our way. they were saying it wasn't a tornado but more like a hurricane - 90 mph straight line winds with rain and hail. i could here the warning sirens outside, but i, like the news reporters were, was mostly concerning myself with everyone outside for the huge concert in memorial park and also the crowds and vendors at the downtown arts fest. but it still wasn't raining and not even the leaves were blowing on the trees.

next thing i know, out of nowhere, the trees started swinging wildly and the wind was howling. i looked across the street out my studio window just in time to see a tree fall on the transformer and the white explosion that followed. that blew out our power and i grabbed finley and ran downstairs. as we were running downstairs, it sounded like a tornado was over us. we could hear the sounds of trees snapping, the wind howling, metal twisting and that haunting "freight train" sound. i got us down to our dungeon of a basement and it was pitch dark in there. i stuck finley in the baby exersaucer that is stored down there (so he couldn't escape into the darkness and mess of the basement). that's when i ran back up to find a flashlight or candles.

when i got upstairs to the front closet (where i never found a flashlight) a huge object slammed into the outside of our house on the other side of the wall where i was standing. (i found out later is was the neighbor's adirondack chair from his porch). then i heard it scrape down the side of the house (we later found it broken inside finley's play fort). then i looked out the front window just in time to see the neighbor's 100-yr old 40 foot tree rip out of the ground and slam into the street and then saw my patio furniture and all my pots and plants get literally sucked off the porch. they didn't slide along the ground, they picked up into the air and flew over the patio wall and scattered around the neighborhood. then the hail started. it was coming at as fully horizontally. our front bay window was being slammed with rain and hail and that window is under about a 10 foot overhang. all that happened in about two seconds while finley was wailing in the basement. so i ran down to join him and we hugged and tried to call daddy.

when i finally got through to matt he has driving toward omaha on the highway and had no idea about the storm. and then it was all over. since i was still in my nightgown, i grabbed a t-shirt from the laundry basket and put it on. then finley and i emerged out of our house to assess the damage, along with all the other neighbors. i surveyed our house and found that the only damage we had included missing roof shingles, holes in the window screens from the hail, and detached rain gutters. i tried not to be too outwardly sad that all my lovely plants and gardening were destroyed. all my pots were dumped and scattered. some pots i found down the street under a neighbor's car and some pots i never found. all my lilies and hydrangeas were snapped off at the ground and my hostas were shredded. my patio furniture was in the front bush, in the street, and even under the fallen fir across the street. we had a huge tree branch fall in our front yard but it didn't hit anything. i didn't complain though, because when i looked across the street i saw that all the houses had trees on their roofs and major structural damage.

i finally met all the people that live in my neighborhood though! too bad it had to be under those circumstances and that i had to look like white trash at the time. remember i was still wearing my nightgown with a t-shirt over it, and i had a bandanna on my head b/c was about to take a bath. also finley had on nothing but a diaper and neither of us were wearing shoes. ha! matt didn't get home for almost 2 hours after the storm. all the traffic lights were out and trees covered all the major thruways. while we were assessing the damage around the neighborhood, he was caught in traffic and in an angry mob of rush hour drivers trying to make their way home on a friday night. click here for the pictures i took immediately after the storm.

when matt got home he anxiously informed me that he had HOURS of work still to do for his law firm and it couldn't wait. but we had no power! soooo, poor us, we had to go to a hotel for the night. finley and i got to eat, bathe and sleep in a/c and matt got to work on his report late into the night. the next day, we got home about 2pm and found our power restored, thank God! however, the people across the street did not, nor did most people in the area. many will still be without power til the 5th, so we were very lucky.

the whole weekend was community cleanup for our neighborhood and our whole city. we were able to clean up our yard and house and make it look almost exactly as it did before. matt and i felt kinda rude on sunday when we were merely weeding the yard and adding some mulch to the front beds while the people across the street were trying to get trees out of their living rooms and collect all the bricks from their chimneys. ah, the pleasant nebraska weather! when will be get a break?