WHAT THE HAIL?!???

All of you know by now that Knoxville was hit with some MAJOR storms on Wednesday night. And by MAJOR, I mean "never seen the likes of it before in my life"! We knew there were expected thunderstorms, but it seems both Jake and I have a adopted a pretty skeptical attitude toward weather men since living in Knoxville. I mean, they are never right about the magnitude of the storms they are predicting. There is always crazy hype, and the most we ever end up with is some heavy rain. So that is what we expected. Jake is also a pretty good weather predictor and he didn't even seem worried, so I felt completely secure telling the kids there was no need to heed the tornado warnings on TV. All we needed to do was sit back and watch the show.

So .....................

... yeah. I'm gonna go ahead and document it here in writing that there might be a slight possibility we were a weeeeee bit wrong on this one ... (don't get used to it folks! ;)

It's a good thing Max does not take these things lightly! Though I tried to persuade Max to come upstairs and watch American Idol with us, he remained down in the basement with his puffy Max chair over his head, attuned to the weather alerts the entire time. Cate and I joined him as soon we heard the sound of golf ball sized hail pounding on our house .... WHAT???!!! I have never experienced a hail storm like this before! It sounded almost like fireworks going off inside the house, and no place with windows felt safe. As if this wasn't strange enough, Jake had just gone out to the YMCA for his very first workout in years (gearing up for his imminent boot camp experience - stay tuned), so we had to weather the storm here without him. I was SO worried that he was driving home at the time the hail hit, which would have been AWFUL considering what happened on the road that he would have been driving home on. In the end, though, I learned that he stayed at the Y during the storm, having been herded into the locker room at some point by the staff. I bet that was a funny sight :D

Here are some pics of the kids at our "severe weather party" in the basement. Except for my being so worried about Jake, it actually ended up being pretty fun down there!

It wouldn't be a severe weather party without a giant wet dog running around everywhere.

Oh and the shaking! Don't forget the shaking ... yeesh!

The scene afterward. This pic doesn't really capture how weird it looked. There was this strange fog rising up from the ground

And this is about the point that it occurred to me that it couldn't be good that my car was parked there on the street.

FYI, it wasn't good. It wasn't good at all.

Wow! Check out the size of those balls!! (Sorry. It's late. Couldn't help myself :)

We saw some that were almost the size of a tennis ball!

Wow.

Thankfully, there were no tornados here (though much of the southeast was ravaged by them), no one was hurt, and all that we have to deal with in the aftermath of this storm is some damage to house and cars. O.k. by me.