Do you feel that?

Living in west Texas all my life, I'm fairly use to severe weather. It's feast or famine around here...if you want to call severe thunderstorms a feast. Really, around here, any type of wet stuff falling from the sky is enough cause for celebration.

And, over the years, you sort of get a feel for the weather. The weather sirens can go off for many different reasons, but if you pay attention you don't always needs them to know that things are getting serious. For example, a few years ago, we were having a severe thunderstorm. Lots of rain and wind. I think the sirens went off, but Jeremy and I weren't all that concerned. NOT because we are 'just use to it', but because you just learn the feel of a storm. My aunt, who had just moved to town from Oklahoma, had not been here long enough to understand this. In Oklahoma, when the sirens go off, people hunker down no matter what.

Last night, we had some weather move into the area. We kept ourselves busy watching Doctor Who on Netflix, but both of us kept an eye on the living room windows. We could see the storm coming from the North. It was a dark gray off in the distance, and as the sun started to set in the west everything was cast in an eerie orange glow against the backdrop of an angry gray sky. The wind would pick up and have all the trees swishing around and then die down to a deadly calm.

This...this....did not feel right to me. And I knew, without the sirens telling me, that the weather that was coming was bad. Luckily for us, the worst of it stayed to the east of us. We watched the whole thing move from the North to the East and then to the South. What we did get was a lot of wind. And when Lola wanted to go outside, I went with her just to make sure she didn't get blown away. Honestly, the wind didn't feel too bad to me out there. But it still made me very anxious to be outside. I was telling Lola to hurry up and do her business, but I sure am glad that she didn't even get off the concrete of our patio because a downdraft came out of no where and snapped a huge branch off our mesquite tree. Lola and I both jumped out of our skins and hurried inside.

After I hollered for Jeremy, he stepped outside to check the damage and make sure the branch wasn't snagged on any power lines. I watched from the window, safely inside, as he took down our bird feeders and studied the branch and the sky. It was making me way too nervous to have him out there so I finally cracked the back door and called him inside. Again, I was just feeling all kinds of wrong about the weather. It wasn't a normal thunderstorm, at all.

And once everything settled down and the internet connection came back up, I could see that my spidey-senses were right on. A tornado did touch down, however briefly.