Evan’s first tornado. And his second. And his third…

Tonight was the live fire test of the emergency plan about what to do with Evan in the event of a tornado warning right over our heads.

Behind Evan’s car seat, at floor level, is a cat carrier with Olivia in it; above her in their own cat carriers are Othello and Oberon. You can barely make out Xena next to the cat carriers (sorry about the dark shot; power was out. This is where the cat carriers actually stay, year-round, and we nickname it the Kittycat Hilton. And this kind of gathering is precisely why they stay there.

I was having a little bit of April 1996 deja vu with this night o’ storms because as this thing crept up to the Arkansas/Oklahoma state line, having dropped tornadoes all over southeast Oklahoma like it was throwing rice at a wedding, the Tulsa NWS office issued…a thunderstorm warning for the counties just west of us. By the time we wound up with a warning, though, it was back up to a tornado warning. I wasn’t thrown by the mere thunderstorm warning though – c’mon, I know the Tulsa weather service office of old. I had cats in their carriers and Xena on her leash already, and Evan was already in his car seat and my wife and I was in the closet by the time the power went out.

We got pelted with pretty decent sized hail, a lot of which melted down into an amorphous mass on our deck (see above). So far as I know, we didn’t take any serious car or roof damage from that, though daylight is really going to be required to gauge that. We had three get-in-the-closet tornado warnings, including one where the walls of the house were shaking, inside of 2 hours.

We also wound up with tons of cedar all over the place. There’s a ton of cedar trees across the road from my house. Or at least there used to be, judging by how much cedar crap there is draped all over our roof, our deck, and our yard. But man, the outdoors, post-storm, smells great. Mmmmm. Cedar.

There’s other stuff to talk about, not least of which is the hellaciously crazy amount of rain that’s dropped on us, but that really needs to wait until daybreak so I can get a photo of the large pond on the property behind us, which is so flooded that it’s creeping up on our property line fence (!!). In all tonight, we spent nearly two hours in or near the closet. At one point we let our guard down enough to let Evan sleep in his own bed, and he was more upset at me waking him up and sticking him back in the car seat than he was about the wether itself.

Thursday’s weather is looking grim, as its a continuation of the same crap we’ve gotten tonight, but my wife will also be at work the whole day, so if there’s another closet confab, I’ll have to round everyone up. Including the boy. :-/