So I don't know if you had heard, but central Texas had some really bad weather just a few days ago. Tornado warnings and severe thunderstorms, actually. Whateley and I ended up having a pretty scary experience.

The day began normally, the night before it rained, but otherwise it's a typical May. The air was really humid and warm though the sky had been filled with gray clouds. After running some errands, we jumped into a bookstore really quickly to look for a book, when the clerk told us there was a funnel cloud spotted not too far away, and that storm was headed straight for the store.

Well, we looked very quickly and got out of there quickly. While we drove, we noticed it started sprinkling, but nothing too bad. We got off the freeway at our normal exit and headed towards our house. The rain got a big harder, but it still wasn't bad. There was thunder and lightning lighting up the sky like mad, but we've seen it all before, so it wasn't fazing me... much. We did see lighting strike the ground not too far from us which ended in a bright spark. That may have been a transformer being hit. Then, we crossed a bridge and suddenly, the rain got very hard, very fast. Our headlights were barely illuminating the road ahead of us, and we just noticed a wall of water pouring from the skies... from left to right. It was really thick. We slowed to a crawl, as did the other cars around us, and I could see Whateley gripping the steering wheel tighter and tighter.

After about five minutes, the rain let up and the driving got a bit easier. But just a couple of minutes later, the rain began pouring again, and the wall of water was back... only this time from right to left.

We drove for a few more minutes, but it looked like the storm was not going to let up anytime soon, and the wall of water just kept pouring down like a flood from heaven. Finally, after we had to slow down to a snail's pace, Whateley decided to pull over and wait out the storm. There was only one place open, a Domino's, so we ran inside to seek shelter. They were nice enough to let us behind the counter and away from the giant glass windows.

The Dominos people were really cool. One guy had a fancy cell phone which he used to look up a website tracking the storm. It was big, but moving very fast. (We found out later that the southern portion of the storm was cycling, which was where the funnel cloud came from, but it never cycled enough to create a full-fledged tornado. And we were driving through that part of the storm when we had to pull over.) We watch the storm buffet our car for a while, and a half-hour later, the storm had died enough that we decided to head home. It was barely above sprinkling by that point.

Our house weathered the storm fine, and we left a bottle of weed killer out in the backyard, but even that came out fairly unscathed. A couple of more storms passed during the night, and thunder and lightning raged through the wee hours, but in the end, Whateley and I and our house is fine. And we won't have to water our lawn for at least a week now. =)

I had forgotten that May is thunderstorm season here. Perhaps one day I'll get used to them like I got used to earthquakes.