I Can't Believe I Forgot the Freaking Derecho

 We had the weirdest storm a couple of weeks ago, a very rare derecho, something none of us have ever heard of before.  I meant to make note of it, but have been too busy being angry about everything else.  

Anyway, I am sitting at my dining room table working on framing samplers, it is very hot and humid outside, one of those suffocating summer days.  All of the sudden, the sky turned black and the wind came up--no sirens, just this crazy storm out of nowhere.  I screamed for the girls to run downstairs, they grabbed the bunny and the dog and into the basement we went.  The power went out and there we were in the dark, listening to loud cracking sounds and howling wind, no idea of what was happening, as our storm room is without windows.  This lasted about 30 minutes, and it got a bit quiet, so I went upstairs to see what was happening.  Just then, a huge branch fell from my big pine tree and went flying past the window--I did some fast back tracking to the basement.  It was all over in under an hour, we found out later that it was not a tornado as we thought, but a derecho, a bit like a hurricane with 120 mile an hour straight line winds.  Our yard was full of broken branches, but our trees stayed standing.  We walked out to see what the neighborhood looked like and had to go back home, huge trees had fallen across almost every street and power lines were taken down with them.  This wasn't even close to how bad it was in Cedar Rapids, I understand that they lost half the trees in the city and almost every building and home has damage.  We were without power only 24 hours, they had no power or water for over a week.  The storm tore across central Iowa and into Illinois, but Cedar Rapids bore the brunt of it.

This is my yard after the storm passed, it doesn't really show how much we had to clean up--took 3 of us working non stop for over 12 hours, and then all the city workers that came to get the brush after we cut it and tied it up.