UUUNNNDDDEEERRRRRRRRR!

Before we talk about the beach, which was really great, I must first talk about the scary storm from last night.

There is an old Abbott Family story about me as a 3 or 4 year old. I hated storms (still do). They scared me silly. The second there was thunder or lightning in the night, I was at my parent's bedside. The story goes that during one of these storms, I stood by their bed and my mom asked me why I didn't like thunder. I told her, "Because it says UUUUUUNNNNNNNNNDDDDEEERRRRRR!"

Last night there was UUUUNNNDDDDEEERRRRR like I haven't heard in a long time. But it was actually the loudness of the wind that woke me right from REM at 2:39 am. I yelled Dan's name and we both bolted out of bed. I literally thought the roof was going to come off the house. We ran down stairs and looked out the back window. They wind chimes were flying off their hook. The grill was on it's side. The doors of the shed were swinging on their hinges. And there was a gigantic tree where our little play house used to be.




Earlier this spring we had a limb fall into our yard,





But last night's limb made it look like a twig.





We pulled up the doppler radar and could see our area was covered in bright red. I wondered about my parents but didn't call because of the ridiculous hour. Somehow the wind managed blow open the door to the garage even though the garage doors were closed. This morning it looks like our house was in a pocket of about 15 houses on three streets that really had major damage to their trees. Apparently we had some 90 mph hour winds last night.

My parent's front window was shattered by hail. The hail and glass reached all the way through their house to the kitchen. It bent the metal window panes and broke the wooden blinds.

We are feeling really lucky that the hail didn't get us this time. Already this year we have been racing around the garage, clearing space for Dan's little car, while the hail flew, in the middle of the night. We had it moved inside to within an inch of it's life. Yet, we still haven't properly made space for it in the garage.

This is actually our back neighbor's tree. We keep hoping they will knock on our door and tell us how they plan to take care of it, because we don't have the tools or the capacity to deal with it. And it's not our tree. They should clear it out, right? We don't know, we're new to this kind of thing.





I keep forgetting about it and then I walk back into the kitchen or the family room and am quickly reminded: that is a freaking big tree! We disbanded the use of the word "freaking" here at our house nearly a year ago when Ava keep getting mad and calling me "freaking mommy!" but that tree is so big and Ava can't read this so I feel okay using it just this once. :)








I went back and forth between the kids bedrooms (who surprisingly never woke up) and the computer where Dan was watching the radar, or so I thought. Once I came back to find him perusing the draft options for Jimmer Freddette at 3:15 am, I took that as my sign that it was safe to go back to bed.