Repent, or ye shall be tornadoed!

For the second time in two weeks, I was putting gas in my car when the tornado sirens went off.

This time I had the weather radio AND the car radio, and while the sky looked pretty dark off to the west, I didn't see any reason to get all frantic about it. The National Weather Service didn't seem to have issued a warning. So I drove on across town to my grandmother's, passing all these screaming wailing sirens, and then went way out to he back of the back yard to watch the clouds rolling in. The eastern sky was clear blue and puffy clouds and sunshine. The western sky was dark, and pinkish and purplish and not so much ominous as very, very cool-looking, like a very adept and brooding fingerpainting. My dad and uncle came to join me, and when the lightning started crashing all around us I crouched down to minimize my contact with the ground, and to let the lightning strike them first. We stood there and watched, debating whether or not the wall of clouds was rotating or not, when one little arm of clouds reached around itself, forming a nice whirling little circle. My first funnel cloud! Hooray!

Then the lightning struck a bit too close, and the funnel cloud was whirling a little too directly in front of us, and the house was a little too far away, so we beat a path to the door right as the rain started. Grandma was getting the food on the table and we all sat in her nice windowy sun room and ate Easter dinner while the hail bounced off the glass and the weather radio squawked out warnings. No plague of frogs, though, so I think it was just a natural meteorological event and not a Holy Message.