Hail or High Water

It was great getting a three day weekend to relax with family, celebrate Easter, and fear for your life in Indiana's spring weather. In the past three days, we've seen hail, wind, torrential rains, and tornados. Finally we have something to complain about in this state besides Daylight Savings Time.

On Friday night, Erin and I went to dinner with my parents and grandparents, and on the way home we decided to run to the northwest side of town to go to Costco. On the way, it started raining pretty heavily. At one point, I heard a couple of splats on the windshield, but the rain was falling with those kinds of splats during the whole drive. But quickly I discovered that these new splats contained ice. We immediately drove into a gas station to get under the awning (nearly having a head-on collision with another motorist who had the same idea). What followed was a hail storm like I have never seen. All around us there were chunks of ice the size of baseballs dropping onto cars. There were windshields and rear windows breaking, not to mention cars being totally destroyed by the hail. We watched a police car get covered in dents...hundreds of them. Once it was over, as we drove on to Costco, there were cars everywhere with broken glass and hundreds of BIG dents all over the cars. In the few seconds we were exposed to the storm, our car got probably ten shallow dents, so we were fortunate.

Having survived the hail (and consuming a berry sundae at Costco as comfort food), we headed home. At about 9pm that evening, we started hearing about tornoados in the western part of the state. As the hour progressed, the reports started emphasizing that the storms were basically rolling up I-74 towards Indianapolis. This was concerning, given that you can hear the interstate from our driveway. Funnel clouds were bouncing up and down from the ground back up into the clouds, and it appeared that they were pretty much headed right for us. I've always said that our poor little house would fold like a bad hand of Poker if a funnel cloud even came into our county, so we hunkered down in our pantry and waited. We heard a pretty good hail storm, but luckily no tornado. All of this made for a stressful Friday night. Here is a link to a news story about the storms, and here is a link to a story with a slideshow of pictures from the storms.

Last night we had another round of storms, and it appears that my yard is going to overtake the house. I put fertilizer down last Tuesday...just in time for the storms. The yard looks nice and green now...at eye level.

Bret