My first tornado.

A few quick changes today. As you'll note I took down the old $25 Vintage logo and wrote in the words Bomber Girl. This is mostly because my Bomber Girl logo design looks like this thus far:

I'm thinking the new name will also make this blog a great place to show off some of my pin-up drawings among other things... because seriously who doesn't have 12 sketchbooks full of pinups hidden away in their closet from my first year post-animation school? I mean right? Right? And what better place to put them then in my blog posts, right? (Read: I am so loving the freedom my new blog title is giving me.)

But back to the topic of today's post. As I believe I've stated before I am from New York. More specifically I am from the Hudson River Valley, New York. In the entire 22 years of life I spent in the Hudson River Valley we never even really mentioned tornadoes. It just wasn't in the local vocab. Tornadoes in that valley mostly don't exist. Every once in a while one jumps over a mountain and does a little damage, but the last time that happened I was in the third grade and didn't even notice what was going on.

This week however.... well, lets just say I had a serious scare. We knew there were going to be bad storms that night with a possibility of tornadoes. We were under a tornado warning from about 8pm onward, but it really didn't even start to rain until close to 10:45pm that night. It was a pretty nasty night. Very windy, lots of lightning, and our backyard started to flood about 25 minutes into the storm.

At about 11:15pm and I was upstairs brushing my teeth when our tornado sirens went off. Would you all laugh at me if I told you I didn't even know what a tornado siren sounded like before last Wednesday? Mr. Fiancé  who was downstairs at the time yelled at me to get downstairs immediately. I spit out what I could of my toothpaste (but didn't have time to rinse, bleh) and zipped downstairs as fast as I was capable of.

I landed at the bottom of the stairs and Mr. Fiancé essentially threw me into the downstairs bathtub, laid down on top of me, and pulled the guest room mattress over us. I think all this occurred in under three minutes, but as we hid in the tub Mr. Fiancé could hear the sounds of a tornado outside. I couldn't really hear anything from under the mattress, but I'm told tornadoes sound a bit like freight trains.

We stayed in the tub until about midnight and I still had a mouth full of toothpaste that I ended up having to swallow. I placed a call to my parents at some point to get storm information and we occasionally got updates from Mr. Fiancé's mother about where there had been tornado touchdowns. All in all we had two miner touchdowns within five miles of our house. One was just up the road.

We eventually crawled out of the bathtub (a might bit stiff I should add) and stayed up for another two hours in case of more tornadoes, but it was just rain, thunder and hail for the rest of the evening. We finally ended up sleeping in the downstairs bedroom since our master bedroom is on the second floor. In the morning we were finally able to get a good idea of what had happened the night before. Our neighborhood, thankfully, was not damaged by the storms. We had some downed limbs and lots of debris laying about, but I consider us to be very lucky. Even my newly planted flower garden survived unharmed. Some of our neighbors were not so fortunate. 

One of my co-worker's parents lost two cars and had some damage to their home home in Griffin, GA. He shared some pictures of the aftermath with me. Thankfully no one in his family was hurt.

His Grandfather's truck.

His Mother's car.

Image from the Times Harold of cleanup in my county. 

I'm sure you've all heard the stories about the death toll throughout the southeast. There are many tragic stories coming out of the region. Georgia applied for and was granted a federal state of emergency and there are several FEMA offices opening in the region tomorrow. I'm so grateful and thankful for everyone that remained safe from the storms and my heart goes out to those who lost their loved ones.

Stay safe, everyone.