West Texas Hurricane?

So I meant to post this on Friday, a day after this all happened.. but life gets busy and so do I! So here's the story:

Thursday evening, I was making dinner when Brandon got home. One of the first things he said to me was, "There's a pretty big storm coming!" I hadn't even paid any attention, which if you know my father, you'd be shocked. I looked out the window to the north and saw the huge black clouds coming and thought sweet! We need the rain!

We sat down to dinner and watched the sky around our house get darker and darker. The wind started to pick up and you could tell it was just about to get pretty bad. I mentioned to Brandon that I had always wondered where we would go in the case of a tornado. We are on the second floor and there are literally windows in every room of our house--including the closet. As we sat there finishing up dinner, the lights started to flicker. We looked out the window and saw the trees nearly bending in half from the wind while pulling and tugging on the power line that comes to our house from the alley (hence the lights flickering). Brandon said, "well, I guess we could go over to my parents' house..." So that's what we did.

I took a quick video of the trees right before we ran out the door, but unfortunately it wasn't during one of the BIG gusts of wind, and I'm talking up to 80 mph gusts!

Literally second after I cut off this video, we ran out into the storm. Trash and trash cans were blowing down the street, big tree limbs were down all over the place, it was a powerful storm!

It started to rain the minute we got in the car. So I pulled up the radar to see what we were up against.. and it showed me this from about 45 minutes before...


In the car I turned around to see how Bridger was doing back there amongst all of the random things Brandon had back there and this is what I saw


Poor thing! She was balancing around empty cardboard boxes! I was laughing so hard at her, and then I moved them for her! We got to his parents' house and ran in the door to watch it rain. The storm brought more wind, hard rain, and a little bit of hail, but after about 45 minutes it was over. We decided to head back home and we had a double rainbow!

Excuse the huge crack in Brandon's windshield...
I thought it was pretty cool!

We returned home to find that we didn't have any power. In fact, one of the street lights nearby had fallen from the wind. I was shocked to see what the wind had picked up and thrown around. There was a metal bench that was flipped over and the back snapped off of it, large tree limbs everywhere, and at the ACU game (I'll get to that next) an entire set of bleachers had flipped over the fence, and all the way into the endzone, tearing the fence down in its path!

Honestly we were a little nervous to come home for fear of what might have ended up on my car, but thankfully there was only a shingle from our roof!

Since we had no power we decided to go buy some cookie dough and go back to his parents' house to make some cookies. They had all gone up to the ACU game by the time we got there so we decided to watch it on TV. That's right, I said TV.

#5 ACU played #2 Northwest Missouri (the team they lost to last year in the playoffs) and Fox Sports Southwest chose it as their Division II game of the week. I guess we could have actually gone to the game seeing as it was less than a mile away, but we would rather watch it from the couch...

I decided to change Bridger's bow to purple just for the game and she was so good for letting me take pictures of her with it.

Then she got pretty annoyed at me so I stopped.. but congrats to ACU for the win! Tonight is Muck Fest for Young Life, so look forward to some pretty disgusting photos soon!