natural disasters

Jen, over at Pen of Jen, wrote about her experiences with natural disasters today. She asked if any of her readers had experienced any themselves. All of my experiences have been from afar - thank you Lord - but, I thought I would share them anyways.

This would be a good place to say that one of my reasons for blogging is to record history for my future generations. So when you come across one of my posts and want to scream, "why is she telling us this? I don't care!," that is why.... recording history =)

I used to live in southern California where earthquakes are a regular occurrence. Growing up there, you just got used to them, maybe even looked forward to them. There was one that measured a 7.1 when I was in 6th grade. I remember being woke up by the shaking and my bed bouncing over the hardwood floor. That was a little nerve racking but I was young and got over it pretty quickly.

Living here in Colorado, we mainly have to deal with tornadoes. They usually occur further east of us, out on the plains and into the next states. We get quite a few sitings of funnel clouds and a good amount of alarms, but rarely does a tornado touch down in the city. But one day I was pulling into the parking lot of my daughter's school, looked up towards the horizon and there it was, a full force tornado.

It was a ways off and since I was looking east, I knew I was fairly safe. But I wasn't sure how far it was and it was in the direction of where I and many friends lived. I have to admit that I was a little scared. By the time Dani got in the car, the tornado had dissipated and we drove on home. We found out that it touched down not too far from where we lived. Luckily, it hit in an area where there was new construction and no people. There were just a lot of scared kids because it happened right as schools were letting out.

I want to include a funny story here. We moved to the Denver area during the month of April, when there are a lot of tornadoes. We hadn't been here but a few weeks when we were out running errands. The skies were dark and it had started raining. We stopped by Dairy Queen to get ice cream and were just leaving the store when sirens started going off. Don and I looked at each other wondering what the heck the sirens were for.

We drove home and as we got out of our car, noticed a couple of neighbors out, looking towards the skies. Being the friendly neighbors that we are, we said hi and then asked them what the sirens were all about. Thankfully, they didn't laugh at us. They just simply said, "those are the tornado alarms." Thankfully, we didn't laugh at them. We just said, "oh," and walked on into the house.

We were in shock. Shock with a capital S. You see, we had NO clue that we had just moved someplace that had tornadoes. Not only did we feel stupid, but maybe second guessing our move to such a foreign place. A place where there are TORNADOES!! lol - we're pretty used to them now.

***************
link of the day:
http://www.digholes.com/