Again, It Coulda Been Worse

Last night around midnight I heard the sounds I had only heard about on television. On television they were saying, "If you hear the sound of a loud train coming through your neighborhood, seek shelter on the lowest floor of your house, or a closet". An', that's just what I did. I quickly got into a closet. It was a tornado and it was thunderous and rumbling; I thought it was going to come right through the walls of the house at any millisecond. Boy, was I praying!!!When it got 'right here', I was shouting my prayers in that blackened closet! The dogs were barking, but I could hardly hear them in all the loud noise. I was praying for our neighbors the loudest. The tornado didn't actually touch down in our neighborhood, but skipped over the field and took out a couple of trailors, but apparently no-one, thank God, was home. I was glued to the tv as much as I could be, when it would stay on (we have satellite). Chief meteorologist Margaret Orr on Channel 6 was very concerned about obvious tornadic activity north of Lake Ponchartrain, so that's where her main point of concentration was. When she looked at our area, where the storm had just passed, she said, surprised, "Oh...that area is showing some spinning going on there". Uh yeahhhh! Hellloooo. This morning, a smart-mouthed, wise-guy weatherman, that Cappy isn't all that fond of, said that he doubted it was a tornado, because looking at his computer stuff, it hadn't even shown up. He shoulda been watching Margaret's computers then.

Sonia, who lives across the street, was out picking up downed limbs and foam insulation from who knows where, when a gentleman, driving through, had her stop and talk over the happenings around town. He said there was also storm damage down along the main drag of town.I'll have to go out later and take a look. Once't again, our patio is trashed. As it was, it wasn't in all that good a shape; I'd taken out the kitchen table and boxes of stuff to be tossed to the road. But it got stirred around prittee good, and when I looked out the back door this morning, it reminded me of how it looked when I came home from running away from the last hurricane.



I always call this neighbor's yard, "Ol' Man Kelsey's Pond". (from Ernest T. Bass on the Andy Griffeth Show) If it's been dry for awhile, it's Ol' Man Kelsey's Crick. Now last night after the ton of rain we got, I looked over there and it was , Ol' Man Kelsey's Ocean. The storm went right thataway, skipped over that sugar cane field, and took out those two trailors, over there a bit beyond the trees. Now Ol' Man Kelsey (not my neighbor's real name) has a bunch of stuff to clean up around his 'pond'.

I have somebody's roof shingles to pick up. Not ours, though. I just now stepped out back and took this picture of two of the houses right next door and across the street from them, whose roofs are still sporting the bright blue tarps, from the last major hurricane, which blew through here last September.

Cappy called and said they'd had a very rough night out there on the boat. It was windy, raining, and hailing to beat the band. This morning, schools are closed in Houma, and the people in his company's office couldn't get to work because of flooding. One of the guys told him that the water is up to his windows and that his and other streets in town are full of water. He told Cappy, laughing, "Come and get me!"

Well, here it is noon and I'm still staggering around all groggy, from lack of sleep last night. The weather radio kept going off with it's loud alarm, keeping me up on all the storms in the area. I shared the bed with a bunch of hangered clothes that I had hurridly taken out of the closet. (No need to rush to put them back, tonight promises to have more thunderstorms, and maybe a replay of last night's adventures.) This morning the dogs woke me up barking furiously at somebody outside. Ohhhh...the granite guy for the kitchen countertops, I thought. I answered the door in the rumpled clothes I was still wearing from yesterday, having been told to sleep in your clothes during bad weather down here, cuz ya never know, but it was a couple of guys who were politely asking if they could forage from my pile of stuff in the yard, that Darryl and Ren had taken down last Sunday. I told them GLADLY they could take as much as they wanted. The garbage guys didn't take one splinter of it. Now I gotta figger out what to do with what they didn't take, which is still a lot, and how to do it, afore Cappy comes home....next Thursday, and I'm still washing coffee cups and pans in the bathroom sink! Keith the cabinet guy still hasn't come back, or let me know about his electrician. The inside of the house looks or feels as bad as the outside. Man. Ahhh, well...it could be worse. For now, anyhow, I still have a roof over my head, a sink, and a pot to...uh...cook in.