Well It Has Been An Interesting Couple Of Days

I have probably mentioned in the past that my husband joined the town volunteer fire dept in January. While he has not completed full training he does respond to calls, and will finish up the end of this summer. I was canceled Sat night from my job, so he had all weekend to respond to calls. I may have also mentioned how dry it is here, and my irritation with the town for letting people burn in the town limits. Well, Sunday evening the kids and I were outside enjoying the semi cool evening. We heard a very large explosion and Caitlin said, oh its burning! Great, what is burning? I turned around and the neighbor across the street had flames and smoke coming from his yard, and I heard his wife way are you OK? Now I was not properly dressed to investigate, nor is there a way to get out of the back yard, so I told my husband to go check him. As he crossed the yard the call went out for the fire dept. Even though he was right there looking at it he had to get in the car and drive to fire dept. The gentleman was OK, and no damage done. He had a paint bucket in a burn barrel burning. So that ended and Monday came along. About 2 I went out to water my poor plants as it appeared no rain was coming again. The sky was clear and it was excruciatingly hot. Within 30 minutes we could hear thunder and the wind was picking up. I quickly put on the weather radar, and sure enough just that fast there were severe thunderstorm warnings up for all surrounding counties. My husband came in just about that time, and it had started to pour. The power started flickering on and off, and then went out. At that same time I heard this loud growling noise, like a huge animal was outside. I said what is that? Then it stopped. My husbands alarm went off, and as he was going out he said that noise might have been the tree knocked down in the yard. Yep one of our, thank goodness, small trees had been blown over, and our bigger tree had limbs down all over the yard. The lightning was fierce. We were out of power for six hours, which is a long time here, but there were so many trees and lines down around town that it took them a very long time to fix them all. This all brings me to my final point. It is hurricane season now here in FL, severe weather is not rare here. FL is the lightning capital of the US, with thousands of strikes daily. It is time to get your emergency preparedness kits ready to go. Most people don't do this and then find themselves unprepared when it happens. I don't put all the things in there they say you must, how would I ever move it, say if I had no car and had to move two children, two dogs, and a rabbit. It just is not feasible. But I always have the basic emergency items we would need, and I am always aware of the weather this time of year. It snuck up on everyone yesterday.