It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

Hello, all!  We've had an interesting spring here in the Upstate of South Carolina.  Storms, galore!  Is it just me, or does it seem like these thunderstorms are way more severe than normal? We've had golf-ball-sized hail several times already, and tornado threats...

Tuesday night, all of us here at the Confessions household went to bed at our usual times.  It seemed like any other night.  Possibility of rain, maybe a thunderstorm... we were actually under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch, which I usually don't worry too much about.  I usually pay more attention when we have a warning.

Around 1:00 a.m., we were awakened by a CRAZY storm!  I have never seen wind and lightning like we saw that night.  And this storm went ON and ON and ON!  Usually severe thunderstorms come in quickly and then go away quickly.  But not this one!  I am not exaggerating when I say that it was like that for at least thirty minutes! 

In the morning, we walked out to find that almost every house on our street had a tree down. 

You can't see it, but on the other side of our neighbors' white truck, there is another huge tree on the ground.

Notice the dirt in the street?  That was from the flooding. 

You can also just barely see a tree laying across the road.

Front view of our house

Our tree in our front yard was struck by lightning, we think, because we can see burn marks where it split.  We have many huge limbs in the back yard.  Trees are in the road and some people even ended up with trees on their cars or homes.  We were blessed that we did not have any home or car damage.  We did lose power for almost 24 hours. 

I do not deal well with a no-air-conditioning situation, so Ryan and I packed our bags and headed to his parents' house!  We stopped off for a quick dinner at McAlister's after finished up with a Zumba class and then headed to our temporary home. 

COLD iced tea!

Club

Potato Salad

Luckily our power came back on around 10 p.m. last night, so we'll have a cool home to sleep in tonight.

All of this has made me really think about all of the folks in Raleigh and Alabama, who suffered so much worse and have so much more damage.  It was hard to live for one day without power... and most of that day I was at work.  So my thoughts are definitely with alf those who have faced such hardships from all the severe storms and tornadoes!