Unbelievable Weather

For all my family & friends that don't live close by, So IL was a scary place to live in yesterday. A round of thunderstorms passed through around 1pm yesterday afternoon with a wrap around cell on the backside of the storms. Luckily Sesser was just on the northern edge of the severe storm, we personally just suffered lots down branches - not any different than a typical spring thunderstorm around here - power outages, funky green skies, branches breaking, trees bending, lots and lots of rain.

Just south of us is where the majority of the damage happened which was basically all along IL Route 13 - Murphysboro, Carbondale, Carterville, Herrin, Marion, Harrisburg. It pretty much stretched from Missouri to the Indiana/Kentucky border. There were winds report over 100 mph, that's class 2 hurricane strength! They've enacted a curfew in those counties, no one allowed on the streets after 8pm (4pm in one town!). In addition to the straight line winds, there were 3 tornado's reported in the Southern Illinois area also.

Just 10 miles south of where we live everyone is without power. The last I heard, between the three major electric companies there are appox 85,000 homes without power and they don't expect to have it restored until Wednesday at the earliest because of all of the trees that uprooted (big, healthy trees) and damaged the lines/poles. This does have a little good news to it - I may not have to go to work Monday and/or Tuesday - no power - no work!

The picture at the top is copied from a local tv stations site, 1000's of pictures similar to this are being shown. You know it's bad when Walmart closes. In the town's listed above, all Walmart stores, grocery stores, and gas stations closed when the storms hit due to damage to the buildings and loss of power - nothing has opened back up yet either. Benton had their power restored by 7:30 last night. You should have seen the amount of people from south of here literally flooding into gas stations, Walmart and fast food restaurants - it was unbelievable.

Interesting tidbit we heard on the news, do you know what the number one item purchased from Walmart is when there is a natural disaster...................Pop Tarts, go figure! The Walmart store manager they interviewed said that Pop Tarts would be brought in by the TRUCK LOAD to the area's affected by the storms. More people buy Pop Tarts than water, batteries, flash lights, etc.....who would have thunk it!

Happy Mother's Day to all the mother's out there reading this.
I'm fixing hamburgers on the grill, french fries, wilted lettuce (out of the garden), baked beans, and layered strawberry cake for Mother's Day tomorrow.

Check back sometime tomorrow, I hope to get some of Arielle's senior prom pictures on my photography blog. Of course she was just beautiful, that person who picks out her formal dresses sure does a good job - I wish she was working at Joyce's when I was in school (and skinny), oh well guess you can't win them all. Also on that note, never under estimate the value of a good seamstress and properly altered dress.

Quick update on the side business, I finally completed all of the graduation/party invitations and Lindsey's wedding invitations - hooray for me! All invitations are in the mail which means in a few weeks I can post pictures. In addition to finishing all of the invitations yesterday, I had to make Arielle's prom flower bouquet/boutonniere ensemble plus two poster boards complete with glitter for my mother for the Little Miss and Mister Rend Lake Water Festival parade that was this morning. I didn't get to bed until almost 1am, my scrap dungeon/basement looks like the hurricane force winds passed through it. Thought about cleaning it up some tonight, but I'm thinking it will wait until tomorrow.