CVSD: Day 33

At the beginning of March, middle Tennessee was hit by a series of terrifying tornadoes in the middle of the night. East Nashville, where my brother and Daniel's sister both live, was devastated. The storm rolled on to Cookeville (where we used to live) and many people lost everything. It was horrific, but thankfully our family members and their properties were okay.

Fast forward several weeks and our state was put under a quarantine lock down followed by a shelter-at-home order. It's been a hard month. But Tennesseans have stepped up and taken care of each other, even amidst the hardness of it all.

On Sunday we celebrated Easter. Holidays on your own are hard. Quarantine holidays are sad. Daniel and I both had migraines. Daniel's dad and his wife drove over to give the kids Easter presents. They stayed on our upper deck and we chatted with them from our porch for a little bit before it started raining.

Worshipping from the living room, via YouTube, is proving to be one of our least favorite aspects of quarantine. I have never felt more profoundly that "the church" is really the people. And I miss the people. I am so thankful to know that the grave is empty, but we miss celebrating that important part of history with our church family.

We were expecting bad weather Sunday night, and right around midnight things got bad. Daniel and I were watching Netflix. It was a loud fight scene, but the wind was howling so loudly that I made Daniel pause our show and flip over to catch the weather. My app on my phone just said severe weather. It sounded worse than that. I kept searching. Finally we found a news station saying "Tornado Warning" for south east Chattanooga. We are north of Chattanooga, but the wind was crazy loud.

By morning we would learn that the east side of the city was hit by an F-3 tornado. Whole neighborhoods are decimated. Live wires cover the ground in some areas. All of our friends are okay, but many are out of power and there is a lot of damage to contend with. Because of the coronavirus, we are told that the best way to help is to stay home and let the first responders do their work. Even though we are fine, there is an emotional component of this that makes this feel extra hard. Hopefully there will be ways that we can help in the days to come. In the meantime, we are continuing to shelter at home.

In the Still of the Night

{via}

If you have watched the news in the last 24 hours you probably realize that most of the Eastern United States was hit pretty hard by a series of storms. Alabama, in particular, was hit very hard over the course of an 18-hour period yesterday.

Daniel got up for work as usual and left about 6AM. Our weather radio went off at 6:45 saying "take cover" and Daniel called me to say that TVA employees were taking cover. I groggily grabbed my laptop and herded Sophie into the coat closet with me. For an hour I surfed the internet and listened to ongoing tornado warnings on our weather radio.

At 7:45 I finally got the all clear and came out of hiding. Most of the morning was sunny but right around lunch time we had another warning come up. Daniel was out to lunch with a couple of his co-workers. Instead of heading back to TVA they came to the house and we passed the time playing Rook.

They got the call to go back to work but within an hour Daniel called to tell me to take cover again. I didn't believe him at first because I was in the bonus room upstairs which faces north and the view was sunny. But I went back into the closet anyway.

As soon as I got into the closet, the power went out. Since my laptop was fully charged, I passed the time working on a couple of freelance projects. After this round I came out to find lots of tree limbs down on our property and several trees down in the neighbor's yards. I didn't find out until later that our neighbors had taken it upon themselves to clear a large tree that had fallen and blocked the entrance to our road. Thank goodness for good neighbors.

Since I didn't have electricity, I spent the rest of the day reading a book. Later that afternoon we went back into the closet and I read by flashlight. Sophie was amazingly calm throughout the day.

Daniel finally came home in time for another warning. This time we grabbed camp chairs and made our way to our walkout basement {unfortunately we don't have access to it from the inside of our house}. This warning passed pretty quickly and we decided to try to go to town to grab dinner.

While out we discovered that all of Scottsboro was out of power – we had assumed {incorrectly} that it was just Hollywood that was affected since TVA had still had power at 4:30 PM.

Since we couldn't find anywhere with power, we went home and made ourselves peanut butter sandwiches and sat our porch watching the weather patterns change and listening to our weather radio. When we tired of that, we went upstairs to read before it got dark. We both fell asleep when it became too dark to read. 

We woke up to a pretty intense lightening storm and headed back downstairs and flipped on the radio. We were under another tornado warning, but based on the radio it sounded like the storm was already north of us, heading up Hwy 72 to Stevenson and Bridgeport. Around 8:30 Daniel talked to his sister and we agreed we were in the all clear for the night and decided to go to bed. People must have gone to bed early in the days before electricity because there is NOTHING TO DO!

We both woke up in the middle of the night to an eerily quiet and dark house. Our house is not that far from Hwy 72, so there is always some amount of sound from traffic, even at night. Also it is never this dark. Since we were both wide awake, we talked about what we needed to have in an emergency kit for the future before going back to sleep.

Daniel's alarm clock went off at 5:30 this morning and he started calling around to see if he needed to go to work. After many calls, he found out that a switch yard at Widows Creek {about 20 miles north of us} had been hit by a tornado and most of northern Alabama and parts of Mississippi were without power. Then we learned from our meter reader that 100+ transmission lines were down due to the storms. We heard reports that it would take anywhere from 3 to 9 days to get power back to our area of the state. Since there is no power, Daniel didn't have to go to work. So we went back to bed.

We finally got up around 9 and decided we needed to clean out our fridge before we left town. We threw away 2 bags worth of groceries and loaded as much as we could into a cooler filled with ice. 

Once we had packed the car we headed out of town going north on Hwy 72 {along with the huge exodus of people that had the same idea}. On our drive north we saw many large trees that had been uprooted, but amazingly there appeared to be little damage to buildings. The town of Stevenson had power and the wait at the one gas station looked like it would take well over an hour. The line in the McDonald's drive through wrapped around the building. Thankfully we had a full tank of gas.

We stopped at a Sonic in South Pittsburg for lunch and then at a Starbucks in Manchester so that I could send out some emails regarding a couple of projects. We are staying at my sister's in Hermitage tonight and will probably spend some time with Daniel's family over the weekend as well. We have no idea when we will go back to Hollywood or when Daniel will be back at work again.

Saturday I will run the Country Music Half Marathon as planned. Other than that we will enjoy spending time with family and friends. So many people were affected by these storms. We are thankful that the only thing we really had to deal with was a power outage.

Graduation, Tornado Threats and Mother's Day

This weekend I was able to fly home for the weekend to celebrate Mark's graduation from Harding University and to be with my family for mother's day. It was a special treat for me and I was pretty thankful to see everyone since I had not been home since Thanksgiving.

Graduation went really well - the biggest highlight (besides seeing my little brother walk across the stage) was at the end, when a graduating student got up and said he had an announcement and then proceeded to propose to another graduating student. It was pretty sweet - not everyday that you see that happen.

Saturday evening, Angela and Mark and I went to WalMart to pick up some last minute things for Mother's Day - unfortunately while we were in WM, tornado warnings started going off. They locked the front doors to the store and herded us all to the back. Of course this was the last place I wanted to be during a possible tornado. We sat on the floor and waited for 20 minutes for the storm to die down.

You could hear the (supposedly 100 mph) wind howling outside and all I could think about was how exposed the inside of WM is and how if the tornado hit the store we would all be impaled by the clothing racks.

Angela found my train of though comical and laughed at me and said that since she was a nurse, she new how to stop bleeding quickly. She was more worried about how many prego women were walking around and hoping that none of them went into labor...

This morning, we all got up early and cooked Mom breakfast for mother's day. The funniest part being when Mom was reading her cards and Mark wrote in his card that he loved her like "a fat kid loves chocolate cake."