Weekend Wrap-up

Caption Contest Winner! This week's winner is Tanya with her, "Ron Jeremy IS the hardest working man in the industry!!" To mirror Holy's response, after reading Tanya's caption, I, too, spit my coffee out!
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Weight Watcher's Update: Well, just as I suspected, my body figured out what was going on and decided to stage a mutiny. After having lost nearly 10# in two weeks, I was only able to lose half-a-pound. But, it's still a loss so I'll take it.

Start: 258
Current: 247.5
10%: 233
Goal: 220-ish
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Yet another wild weather weekend, and frankly, I'm getting tired of the violent weather. The wonderfully cool temperatures and low humidty is great. But what we experienced Friday I don't ever have to experience again.

We were going to Des Moines for the weekend and there was a 60% of rain during the day and into the evening. I watched the clouds slowly build throughout the afternoon. And watched them get increasingly darker.

At last word the storm was traveling around 60 mph. We figured once we got on the road we'd out-run in. But after my mom called me twice in less than two minutes with a panicky message of, "The storm is moving at over 80 mph. Get off the road now! You'll get blow off!"

I watched the storm in my rear-view mirrors get closer and change from dark grey to sickly mint-green. Steve found a you-scrub-it car wash with some empty bays and we dove in about 5 minutes before the brunt of the storm hit. I called my mom to let her know we were off the road and described the white front of the storm as it rotated due to the massive wind sheer. Then

WHAM!

The wind hit full-force and I scrambled back into the car as the back end got pelted with pea-sized hail for almost 2 minutes. If there was ever a time that you could have a complete white-out due to rain, this was it. No lie. There were some trees about 60' in front of us that just disappeared. This was more than mere sheets of rain. Visibility was maybe 20'.

We hunkered down to wait it out for 20 minutes. Kudos to Steve for scouting out the car wash. Normally when we go to DSM we take 680 North instead of I-80 through Council Bluffs; much less traffic. However, we picked the girls up from daycare on our way out so we took 80 through CB. Had we been on 680 we would have had no cover, no protection. So I thanked God things worked out as they did.

However, not everyone was so lucky. We later learned of two teens from CB that were instantly killed when a tree fell onto their car. The pictures showed that the tree pretty much cut the car in two. If you have the time check out our local online news station with stories, video, and pictures of the storm.

Our house didn't sustain any damage, just some plant damage. But on the other side of the block where I grew up a 40' blue spruce just toppled over in the wind. My mom saw it happen. The ground is so saturated that the roots have nothing to hang on to.

132K people were without power after Friday's storm. As of this morning 32K still had no power and some may not get it back until this weekend. The last storm that knocked out this much of the city was in 1997 with the October Snow Storm. I have to drive through one of the older neighborhoods to get to daycare and work and the trees are HUGE; 70' tall, well-established monsters. Many of them completely uprooted or with major limb damage. The offical wind speed was 115 mph and has been classified as stright-line winds. This is similar to tornadoes as far as wind speed but there is no rotation and the path is much wider whereas tornadoes have a very narrow path of destruction.