tornado alley

We've had a very strange last couple of days.

Wednesday night, there were 4 tornadoes that touched down about an hour or so from us in Kirksville, MO. Three people were actually killed, which just makes the situation even sadder. Kirksville is where Mike goes from some training that is only going to last a day. He also goes there for meetings because it's the regional headquarters (I think..). I'm not sure if he's talked to the foresters he knows that live up there, but I hope everyone is okay. We only had rain and high winds on Wednesday night.

Yesterday, Mike and I both had the day off, so we went to Quincy to get his drive shaft fixed. It only takes about 20 minutes to get there but the temperature dropped 5 degrees while we were driving, and the sky went completely black. We had to turn our headlights at noon! We dropped off the drive shaft and then went to the grocery. The sky lightened up a bit but not too much on our drive back to Hannibal. On our drive, the weather came on the radio and just talked about flash flood watch for Quincy, IL and Palmyra, MO (both are north of us). So we kind of thought we were in the clear. We were wrong..... About 5 minutes later (we were still on the road home) a another weather alert came on changing everything to tornado warnings and included southeastern Marion county. THAT'S US! We get into Hannibal and we hear the tornado sirens going off. It's still not raining and it's not windy at all. We get home, drag the groceries in and I say,"You know, I think we should just go hang out in the basement for a while." Mike just looked at me but then agreed with me. So we grabbed some snacks and drinks real quick and went downstairs. The warning was only for about 30 minutes, so we knew we wouldn't be down there for very long. We flipped on the T.V. and the weather channel was covering our storm system and even had a correspondent in central Missouri. Then all of a sudden, it started raining HARD. We have a walk out basement, so Mike went to the door to see how bad it was outside. I know, probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but we got to see and you could hardly see through the rain it was coming down so hard.

In the end everything was fine, but I'm still glad we went downstairs. It stopped raining and it was actually a pretty nice rest of the afternoon/evening. I don't think there were any tornadoes yesterday. I am glad Mike was off work, because I probably would of got a little scared if I were home alone.