The Great Storm of 2013

So I definitely took a blogging break this past week.  Believe me- it was totally unintentional!  Before I get to what's been going on this past week, let me back up a little bit further...

A few weeks ago, we decided to pull up a large mulch bed in our front yard and cover it with sod.  In addition to putting sod on those areas, we decided to go ahead and place it in other "problem-areas" around our yard.  You know, the places where we could never get grass to grow.  It was a lot of work.  First we had to pull up the landscape timbers, till up the ground, level everything and then actually lay the sod.  While Kevin did the majority of the work, I ended up laying about 1 pallet of sod myself and of course helped with all of the prep work. I was sore for days.  Here are a couple of in-process pictures...

We got a good bit of rain and the sod was starting to grow well.  We were feeling pretty good about our yard.  Well... fast forward to last Wednesday (July 17th).  Remember this post?  Well, that basically happened again to a lesser extent.

My work rented out the zoo for the evening for a big family event.  Since it was a Wednesday, Kevin wasn't able to come, but Kate and I decided to go for the first part of the event and then meet Kevin over at the church.  Like every day for the past 6 weeks, they were calling for rain but the event was still on and Kate was so looking forward to seeing the "Lion King" so we went anyway. We stayed at the zoo for about an hour and the "Lion King" was a hit. She loved the real ones, but also had fun with the lion statues.

Well, around 6ish, Kate and I started heading to the car.  The skies were getting really dark so we knew it was about to start pouring.  About that time, my phone rings and it is Kevin.  Our conversation goes something like this:

Kevin: Are you somewhere safe?
Me: Um, I'm in the middle of a parking lot, walking to the car... so, I guess that's a no.
Kevin: Well, you need to get in your car, drive to a gas station and pull under a cover somewhere.
Me: Really? It's not even raining here yet.  What's going on?
Kevin: Well, our yard is destroyed. Luckily our house is okay, I think. It's hailing so hard your car would be really damaged if you tried to come home now.
Me: Was it a tornado? (It was getting REALLY windy where I was even as we were talking.)
Kevin: Maybe.

So, yeah. The storm was bad at our house. So bad, that 4 trees fell.  Two of them fell across our driveway and blocked Kevin in. Our power line snapped, along with the cable and internet line. We were without power for two days and without cable or internet for a week.  It got fixed today, which is why I can now share our story!

Tree #1...

Tree #2...

Trees #3 and #4 (both uprooted)...

We are SO thankful for 5 of the men from our church who spent all day Saturday with us removing the trees from our yard.  So, SO thankful!

We have had a few people tell us that they did see a funnel cloud near our house, and two of our neighbors say they saw a fireball go over our house.  Really.  The only thing that we can figure is that our power line snapped and caused some kind of spark as the wind (or funnel cloud) was coming over our house and it looked like there was a fireball.  We got pretty lucky that our yard was the only damage.  Our poor sod. :(