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Thursday, February 7, 2008

Storms A-Brewin'

On Tuesday night I had an interesting experince worth noting. While driving to my Bible study at around 7pm (it was dark), I encountered 20 minutes of the worst weather I have ever seen. As I was driving east on Lake Woodlands Drive, I saw flashes of lightning on the near horizon and I was driving right into it. This was not wimpy California lightning. There was virtually NO significant time laspses between flashes. It was almost a constant barrage of lightning for twenty minutes. Flash! (one-thousand) Flash! Flash! (one-thousand, two-one-thousand) flash...Flash... FLASH! And crazily loud booms of thunder. I began to panic, thinking I was going to get hit and burned to a crisp or turn albino (remember the movie Powder?). Anyway, I am no panty-waist, but I was genuinely afraid. Then suddently, loud thuds ring out as massive hail pounds my car. We are talking peanut-M&M hail. I saw the temperature indicator drop from 71 to 58 in about 5 minutes. It begins hailing so hard, and the lighning is so intense that cars pull off the road, and I begin to panic, as I am sure my car is being dented. I begin crying hysterically (new car), and driving around like a mad-woman trying to find a tree to park under. I pull into a well-groomed neighborhood and finally pull over without protection for any trees. I begin to think a tornado is coming (not totally far-fetched considering 5 southern states were hit earlier that day). I grab my phone and call Kent, who can't really do anything, and then I call my friend Tara (whose home I was on my way to), but nobody could understand me becuase I was crying so hard. Eventually, I saw a tree ahead, and had to pull half-way onto somebody's lawn to be under it. And, after about 10 more minutes, the hail turned to hard rain, and I went on my way, all sweaty and puffy-eyed.

That evening (my car was perfectly fine), I watched the local news to see if they had footage of this horrific storm, and the thirty-second weather portion went like this... "Well, and on to weather. The Woodlands experienced a little bit of hail today, as a cold front came from the north. Now let's look at this weekends beautiful, sunny forecast...." This was not even a storm worth mentioning!

My only consolation was that knowing that these Texans would be peeing their pants during a California earthquake while I would be enjoying the jolt.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

ha! i'm glad your car was ok. that can be really scary. FUNNY but on Wednesday morning at 5:30 I was awoken by an earthquake. I was like, "either that was an earthquake, or someone just drove a car into the house.....zzzzzzzzzzzz" haha
It was a 3.1 magnitude based about 7 miles west of here.