Funder, Whitening and Toe-madoes--Take Two!

We had some crazy storms roll through here last night--major enough to apparently make some news on the National Weather Channel! Here are a few pictures that we snapped while we were supposed to be "taking shelter in an interior room on the lowest level of the house" out of our back door during the storm, and shortly after.

Clouds circulating....they were so low and moving so fast!

This is right over our back yard--you can see the swingset in the lower corner

Lake Merritt has returned! To the boys' dismay, however, it was gone by this morning.



Shane checking out our neighbor's tree across the street--it split the whole tree in half

Another tree split right around the corner. Literally, there was damage on every side of us, but we had NONE in our own yard! We were praising God for that!

Welcome to Catlin! Don't mind our mess, please.

Here is the link to a local article (and better picture, actually) of a train that was derailed by either vicious winds or a tornado that touched down. This is one mile east of our house....tornadoes were touching down all around us, apparently, but thankfully there was no major damage.

You can see part of the train is half-sitting on the tracks....

....and those are the cars that were all tipped over on their sides.

They said it overturned 40 cars total, out of about 75.

Mangled cars


And, from the opposite angle....

(By the way--yes, we were totally checking out damage as soon as the storm was over! Shane would definitely be 'that guy' you see in all the Weather Channel videos that is like, 10 feet from the F-5 tornadoes with a wriggling video camera, saying things like "Oh man.....it's tearing the whole building apart! Oh, man!! Oh, man!!!)

Ahem.

While it was more than devastating for Cameron to watch his precious swingset being torn into pieces and blown into the field behind our house, we were more than thankful that that was all the damage that was done!