Kentucky weather is a freak show.

Yesterday was the CRAZIEST day.

I had a 4-hour test at the hospital in the morning, and check-in time was at 6, so I was up really early. I met my mom at her house and she drove me to the hospital. And we sat around (the test is really boring) and watched TV in the waiting room. There were occasional blurbs about severe weather north of us in Indiana, but everything would die down by the time it reached Louisville.

After the hospital, we ran over to Kroger to pick some stuff up for Bible study kick-off, and then intended to stop at Steak N Shake for lunch. After we checked out at Kroger, we headed for the door, and heard tornado sirens. They test the sirens every Tuesday at noon, so I asked mom if it was 12 yet. She said no. We were walking to the car and this lady came power-walking out of the store behind us, and she said that "the girl at the counter said something about a tornado warning." Uh huh. Have I mentioned that tornado warnings seriously freak me out? That's another story for another time. So we got in the car and turned on the radio, and mom was talking on the phone, alternating between asking dad if he knew what was going on (he is basically a meteorologist without a TV job) and talking to her coworkers, who were actually across the street from the Kroger we stopped at. Meanwhile, the lady on the radio is saying something about the storms heading our way, and circulation over downtown Louisville. The areas of town she is listing are on the opposite end of the county from us. Mom asked if I still wanted to stop and get lunch, and I said that I didn't because I didn't feel like eating anymore. I repeat: tornado warnings freak me out.

So we're driving back to the house, and mom calls my brother and tells him to go ahead and head toward the bathroom, one of the safest parts of the house. We take our refrigerated groceries inside and leave everything else in the car. Jonathan turns on the TV and we keep losing the satellite signal. The brief glimpse we had of the radar showed a huge gash of red covering, well, pretty much the whole city. If you weren't red, you were orange. Then the power went out. I went ahead and took my purse and my tote bag to the bathroom and sat down on the closed toilet lid and started texting my friend to distract myself. I texted Brandon, too, to let him know about the tornado warning (not that he really gets concerned over those things.) I remember mom was in the living room, still on the phone off and on, and she was looking out the front window. The wind kicked up and she said "oh my gosh" a couple of times. The wind I guess had twisted or bent the "children at play" sign across the street. She told Jonathan to get in the bathroom NOW and she came back, too. At this point I was openly sobbing, of course. Diego, my dog, was freaking out and digging in the comforter I had asked Jonathan to bring into the bathroom. The wind picked up again, and again, and I remember my mom saying something to the effect of "oh my gosh", but seriously, I was too busy crying to notice. Then there was this sound, like someone holding a microphone up to their mouth and blowing really hard. I think mom said "oh!" and I said "oh, crap" and grabbed the dog around the neck with one arm and the towel bar with my other hand (not that it would do any good), and after maybe two or three seconds, it was over. Now, when you hear a tornado, and your brain registers "hey! That's a tornado!", you honestly don't know whether it will be over in a millisecond or if the house you're in is about to be lifted off the foundation and smashed into the ground. You don't know if the side of the house is going to blow off or what. That was the craziest part for me. It kind of sounds like exaggeration, but I know what tornadoes can do. I mean, look at Joplin and all those places that got hit by those freak tornadoes last year. They came out of nowhere, and people DIED. But it passed over pretty quickly, the wind died down, and the rain started. Mom and Jonathan left the bathroom and started looking at the damage, but I was still just sitting around crying, texting my friend Zach and praying that everyone I knew was ok. I ended up calling Brandon at work, and he said "you're fine, I'm working, bye." Everything was fine over huge parts of Louisville- I even saw one tacky post by someone on facebook that the storm was a "letdown". Um, no. No, it was not, thank you.

No one lost their house and no one died, but we did find some damage when we went outside. For instance, there was a gutter laying in the yard to the left of my parents' driveway. We later figured out that it came from the far right side of the neighbor's house, to the right of my parents' house. Half of the backyard fence was down (meaning the dogs couldn't go outside), but it fell in the opposite direction that the gutter was thrown. You could see through neighbors' yards several houses down because of the fences that had broken. It was a clean, clear path of destruction. A house across the street lost a lot of shingles, rolled up like carpet in some spots to expose the plywood underneath. Tree branches (not big ones) were everywhere. Part of the gutter to my parents' house was torn off, but it was found nearby. More shingles were rolled up or strewn around yards of several nearby houses. The power was out for several hours. There was a lot more damage a little further down the street- a street on the left hand side had entire trees down, electricity poles snapped in half, powerlines down, lamp posts broken with their "lamps" thrown two doors down. Big chunks of roof were peeled up; even the plywood underneath was gone on some houses. It was just insanity. I did not appreciate it. It certainly was not the way I planned on spending my day off.

Meanwhile, everything was fine at my inlaws' house, and my house. Brandon got home a few hours after the storm and said the power was on, so after ordering some pizza for a late lunch, Jonathan and I took the stuff from mom and dad's fridge over to my house, and he got to play video games for a few hours with Brandon. The power came on late in the afternoon and mom and dad came to pick him and their food up. Bible study got canceled- mom is kind of the leader and she wasn't going to be able to go, but she left the decision up to everyone else and they decided to just go ahead and meet next week. I'm looking forward to that. Hopefully we won't have a hurricane or a blizzard or anything, though. Really, tornadoes scare me more than just about anything else, so I don't think I'd have a meltdown if different kinds of bad weather happened.

So that's how I spent my Tuesday. It was the scariest/most interesting day I've had in a while, so I came here to tell my harrowing tale, and then I'll go take myself a nap. The last 24 hours or so have been kind of exhausting.