Still Afloat

The weather adventures have been accumulating.  About a week ago, I was at a convention in Houston - could not have happened at a better time, as there is now flooding, and yet another part of a system has parked itself over the middle of town.

While I was there with a friend, I woke up at 7:15 to find my phone saying, "Tornado warning in your area!  Take shelter now!  This warning expires at 6:45."  The tors are really small down here, with a few exceptions.  This one apparently passed about 4 miles away from our hotel, a short-lived F1.  I must commend the hotel staff for not waking up every guest just because we were in a warning polygon for a small tor.  I really needed that extra hour of sleep.

Also at the con, I noted a tor warning over my neighborhood at home.  I called to verify my housemates were safe. Luckily it missed our neighborhood by a good 10-15 miles, and was likewise small.  I have seen pics of the flooding in Austin, but haven't seen any of it with my own eyes yet.  Our house is on a hill, so no worries there.

Then we drove home from the con through the next line of storms - my friend described it as "harrowing," but then she had grown up in the Great White North.  I found the drive quite pleasant, as there was almost no hail, and we had the road mostly to ourselves - in a driving downpour, the biggest hazards are differences in speed between you and other vehicles. The wind wasn't even all that bad - didn't really feel like I was fighting it much.  Visibility did get so crappy that I elected to pull over for about 10 minutes, though.  Nice to hear the thunder.

Upon making it to a travel stop midway, I stopped to talk to a motorcyclist, who told me that my main route into Austin was closed.  It's not like northwestern Oklahoma down here, where the road network has very few coverage gaps.  There are pretty much two ways into Austin from the east, and that's it.  We took the only other detour available to us, and by the time we made it mostly home, the closures on that one due to accidents / flooding had cleared.

Found out later that a small dam in a state park pond had failed, causing the highway on our original route to flood.

Two nights ago, another line went through.  I was standing on the front porch when a turquoise flash lit up the entire sky - followed by a loud, low note like a tuba, then a crack - a transformer had blown.  A few minutes later, another one went.  Really cool sound.