Kansas.

 I thought to myself on Friday night that I would like a Friday night refund.

I knew the weather would be ugly earlier in the day. My phone beeped all day about the potential for bad weather that night. I asked a few people if they were worried, and even asked my neighbors when I got home that night.

Everyone said nah, it will be fine.

My town is just fine. There were three tornado warnings that night, and the worst thing that happened to me is that I had to hear my blind dog growl at the sirens each time they went off. 

The photo below is from KAKE News near Wichita. 

Right now, I'm thankful that the biggest problems in my life don't seem that big at all now.

Make lemonade.

It was 80 degrees on Wednesday afternoon and about 25 degrees on Wednesday night.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Having fresh flowers in my house makes me insanely happy. The smells! The colors! The prettiness!

I'm doing this more often from now on.

All the pretty colors.

I am a lot of things, but patient is not one of them.

I'm also not a quitter.

Last week, I decided to travel an hour west because I was craving my favorite restaurant. I really thought I would have enough time to get home before the storms hit.

I was wrong.

I am grateful there were no tornadoes or hail in this storm. There was a lot of wind and rain, and it was kind of fun to see the vehicles chicken out and pull over.

A line of us crawled all the way home without quitting, at a whopping 45 miles an hour.

In the photo below, I was going east, and I had already driven through the colorful stuff. Why stop to let a storm pass when you just drove through the worst of it?

I decided to keep going.

I needed gas, though. That proved difficult in Cimarron because there were cars underneath the gas station awning.

Guys, let's think about this for a second. Look at the pretty colors in the photo below. A gas station awning will not protect you from rain when the rain is horizontal.

Move so I can gas up, people!

It wasn't the smartest decision I've ever made, but it was kind of fun.

Tornado kisses from Pickles

I've lived in Kansas for all but six months of my life. 

Yesterday was the first time I've ever seen a tornado.

It went something like this:

I was getting ready to shut my brain and my computer down for the day at work. My phone was buzzing with weather warnings for a few minutes, and finally I saw that we were in a tornado warning.

I walked into a co-workers office, and asked if this tornado warning was something we needed to be worried about.

Sometimes, we'll have warnings, even though a tornado is in the same county but moving away from town.

My co-worker looked out her office window: "Oh, do you mean that tornado?"

Why yes, yes I do mean that tornado. And the fact that I can see it means I'm worried about it.

I did what any other normal Kansan would do in that situation - I went outside and looked at it. In the span of a few minutes, the tornado grew in size. (See the photo above vs. the photo below)

As someone else outside pointed out, it was getting bigger and heading straight towards us. 

At that point, I noped out of there, went home, threw my dogs and my purse in the basement, and decided I had enough time to put my car in the garage. 

While I was doing this, I got a frantic phone call from my aunt: "Get your dogs and go to your basement now."

It wasn't so much a request, as it was a warning. My aunt works in the south part of town, just as I do, and she watched the tornado grow just like I did. 

That tornado fizzled out, which made me laugh later in the night. I went from OH MY GOD to dude, let's chill out and watch the rain in a matter of minutes.

It's one thing to go into your basement because of radar indicated rotation; it's quite another thing to go into your basement because you see a tornado coming for your part of town. 

The only thing the tornado did was scare the poop out of my dogs. (Literally.)

Sorry, dogs. I would have left you out longer at noon had I known there would be a tornado at 5 p.m. which would interrupt your afternoon poop break.

We lived. 

Penny's "Seriously, a tornado?" face after we came upstairs.

Tornado kisses from Pickles in the basement.

A day in the life

Photography by little curly-haired niece. She's brilliant.

Rub a dub dub, three Pigs in a tub.

Photography by my favorite red-headed niece.

Dog day afternoon.

Did you say Grandma's house?

No more tree limbs! I'm still cleaning up the trash left behind, though.

Blurbs for Monday

This weekend I posted Facebook updates on my nieces, an NPR story about Syria and a link to my previous blog post.

My mind wanders.

(Some people say I have a short attention span salad.)

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My friends and I played Cards Against Humanity the other night. The best card, that I can say out loud without blushing?

Tonight on Nickelodeon: Clarissa explains liking big butts and not being able to lie about it.

Giggle.

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I've had a quote stuck in my head from Lost over the past week or so.

"Shouldn't we be encouraging the ones with ambition?

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We got a couple inches of snow last night.

Penny the Pug isn't happy.

Of course, on Facebook this morning people are griping about the road conditions. Can't we afford to salt our roads? Our taxes are too damn high! This town sucks! This state sucks! We should move!

People, it's two inches of snow. Learn how to drive.

There was a car in the ditch on my way to work this morning. It sucks for that car, and in case it's somebody I know, that's a bummer, dude. I hope the car isn't damaged (it was a Ford Focus, though, so maybe it needs to be damaged).

Like I said above, it's two inches of snow, not two feet of white stuff.

Gah.

Pretty much.

This.

This is not a weather story.

I first noticed the sky yesterday afternoon. It was kind of overcast, and Mother Nature started to spit out a few rain drops.

I mentioned it to my family, and asked if everyone had their car windows rolled up.

Soon after that, the downpour started. And then came another round, and another, and another.

It hailed between downpours several times.

I don't know how many times it rained or hailed, but it seemingly went on forever. My little place in the world is in a drought, so any type of precipitation is usually welcomed with open arms.

I'm sorry for the people who got hail damage, wind damage, tornado damage or any other type of damage.

Bad stuff aside, it's kind of peaceful to look outside and see Mother Nature giving us something we so desperately need.

We pray for rain in church every Sunday for farmers. While we could have done without the ugly stuff, that prayer was answered yesterday.

My hometown got anywhere from 3-5 inches of rain. My phone was buzzing the whole night with severe thunderstorm warnings and flash flood watches.

Flash flood watches in western Kansas? Those are still weird to get.

Lovingly stolen from the US National Weather Service Dodge City's Facebook page.

My Dad and I drove around afterwards to look at the town. There were odd-looking rotating clouds for a time. The pond/lake at the community college was flooded, and a bridge that normally rests in the middle of the lake came loose, and was floating at one end of it.

There was water flowing in the river (although it probably didn't last very long).

Western Kansas needed a drink badly.

Funny side story:

How to get the latest local weather data is instilled in my brain from being a newspaper reporter. Last night while laying in bed, I did this without even thinking:

Go to local National Weather Service website: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ddc/
Click on 'Latest Text Products'
Click on 'Local Storm Report'

And there you go, all of the hail, wind, rain and tornado reports for my hometown for the night.

In other news, I'm a nerd.

Haha.

When it's busy weathering outside, one thought flashes through my mind - At least I don't work at a newspaper and at least I don't have to write a weather story tomorrow.

Score.