This Tornado Is Brought To You By....

This is what our porch looks like during 70 mile-an-hour straight line winds, with sideways rain coming towards the camera . There is no bright shining light off to the lefthand side of our front porch - that was the daylight bouncing off the sheets of rain.

These pics were taken about an hour ago when we had severe thunderstorms move through. The area east of us is still under a tornado watch, and damage reports are coming in. Our county is under flash flood watch, and people to the south and north of us had hail up to the size of a small chicken egg. Trees and limbs are down, and one tornado sighted about 5 miles away stayed on the ground for 100 yards or so, with boats being blown and flipped over on the lake.

Just prior to the storm, the sky turned a deep dark black - an impressive black - a Halloween black with clouds swirling in clockwise layers, enough to give the Minnesota in me a bad feeling

Halfway through the storm, the rain is coming down sideways and simultaneously filling the gutters and blowing up out of them at the same time. The splash you see here is just the blow-back. Up inside the porch, on top of the column, the baby birds and their mama are sitting tight down in their nest, hoping for the best.

Our neighbor's house was almost completely hidden in the rain, except for this brief moment in between cloud bursts.

We were lucky - I checked the yard and we have no trees or limbs down, no damage to the garden (blueberries are out dancing in the rain - there are no words in blueberry language for "too much rain" - which is good, since they've gotten almost 5" in the last three days), and the greenhouse is just fine. The immediate neighbors all appear to be fine, although my parents are without electricity at the moment, but that's normal for their area in any storm (and they'll probably be back up within the day).

Welcome to Tornado Season 2009 - here we go again.