The Tempest

I'm not sure if there's a scientific term for what just happened in Omaha -- but the shit, and EVERYTHING else in this city, hit the fan. Quite literally.

I have NEVER witnessed a storm like what blew through here yesterday evening... it came from outta nowhere, looked like a tidal wave of clouds when it rolled in and maybe last 30 minutes -- tops -- but it devastated huge chunks of mid-town Omaha. Trees pulled out of the ground by their roots, live wires on the ground everywhere... cars flattened by trunks and limbs poking through houses.

I'd never seen anything like it before.

I was at the gallery when it hit -- and I thought I was gonna loose my shit. I have some trouble with storms... they freak me out (okay, that might be a bit of an understatement), when the sirens go off, I lose it. Yesterday was like something out of a movie -- things flying everywhere, trees bent so low they were touching the ground, and the hail -- I can't even begin to explain it. It was coming down in sheets -- horizontally. The entrance to the shop flooded a little, but no real damage. The worst thing that happened was that when the power went out -- it caused my QuickBooks POS to blow and I've lost the past month's worth of data -- no inventory or sales records for the past 30 days. It could have been a lot worse, I've been trying to sort it out all afternoon and learned a valuable lesson about backing up data.

My neighborhood looks like a bomb hit it.

I headed home after the storm passed and it took me 45 minutes to make a 10 minute trip. When I got close to the house -- I couldn't get to my block -- there were giant 100 year old trees across every street. I finally just parked and walked in -- went back for the car later.

Aside from a lot of water in the house because the wind blew the screens right out of the windows, and a lack of electricity -- it weathered the storm better than I had expected. What I had expected -- especially when I reached my block and saw all of the down trees was that either my oak out front or my neighbor's death-trap of a mostly-dead ash in the back had fallen on the house. I'm not sure how this didn't happen -- since most of the trees around my house are on the ground -- but I've been counting my blessings a million times over.

I'm feeling beyond lucky today. Beyond lucky, and truly grateful for it.