I stayed home from work today and we were very glad that I did because the weather today ended up being very exciting. The morning wasn’t exciting. In fact neither Dominica nor I had any inkling that we were in store for any interesting weather at all.
I worked as usual this morning. At lunch time we talked about going out for a walk to Cafe Brazil. We were just about to walk out the door when I had an emergency come up and I had to work for a bit. Then we checked and it was starting to rain, so we decided that it was best that we hadn’t set out for a walk at that particular moment anyway.
Within a very short time I got a text message from Watson asking how we were doing and if I was taking shelter at the office in Irving. I asked what was going on as we had no idea. He told us that tornadoes were seen and he was watching out of his downtown windows looking out towards Irving and they could see the storm hammering the area. That’s when we heard the Farmer’s Branch tornado alarms go off and realized that quite a storm had moved in on us unexpectedly.
In no time we were in tornado warning conditions with crazy amounts of wind and rain. Boy were we glad that we didn’t go out for that walk, we would have been caught quite some distance from home, on foot, with the kids.
We started watching Twitter and NOAA to see what was going on. It turned out that today was a mad crazy tornado day. The DFW got completely pummeled by tornadoes all afternoon. It wasn’t long before we heard the Carrollton sirens and the police announced that there was a tornado at Trinity Mills and the Tollway. Too close for comfort.
We took the kids and Oreo and we huddled in the master bedroom closet which is the closest thing that we have to a shelter. It has no windows and is not open to the garage like my office is. I’m not completely convinced that the office isn’t safer, though, as it is newly constructed and has more structural elements to protect it than the other side of the house does like more brick, a corner, newer walls, more walls, a reinforced ceiling, etc. While huddles in the closet we watched Twitter carefully to follow the progress of the tornadoes. Arlington was getting hit really hard. There were tornadoes all over the DFW and one right down the street from us. We could hear the tornado but never saw it.
We made it through the tornado without a problem. There appears to be no damage in our neighbourhood at all. Having a tornado makes for an interesting day, though! I spent a while this afternoon sitting out on the patio reading. The weather, once the storm was past, was perfect for sitting outside.
Once the storms had died down we went out to Brookhaven for kids’ night. It was a very slow evening at Brookhaven. No one was out golfing so that severely limited the number of people coming in for dinner as well.