How about this weather?

Not that I'm the kind of person who usually talks about the weather...but this week our weather has been crazy! We knew going into this week that it would be...interesting...but we didn't expect anything like we've got. And especially didn't expect the beginning and end of the week to be polar opposites of each other, either!

Last weekend was beautiful! Mike and Rebecca were here, actually (pictures pending) and we grilled out and enjoyed the 50 degree weather. Monday was supposed to be nice...windy but warm (it was a high of 75).

So monday came...and nobody expected the wind to be as bad as it was! They predicted 20-25 mph wind with gusts to about 40. Which, for those of you who have lived in this part of Kansas before, know that that is a typical "windy" day. And we seem to get the brunt of it because our house is completely exposed on the south side, which is where most of the wind comes from.

Explained by my dad as being becuase "Nebraska sucks and Oklahoma blows".

But Monday afternoon, the wind picked up to being around 40-45 as the median wind speed with gusts that were clocked at the airport up to 62 mph. The winds were so high that the line of powerlines behind our house actually snapped off. Not tilted or blew over...literally snapped in half.

We hadn't ever noticed before then but we don't have a powerpole directly behind our house. Which makes us very lucky. Because about every other house has chunks of their fence missing. It is actualy really lucky that the poles snapped where they did because if they had been a littl elonger there is a good chance there could have been damage to some of the houses!

This is a picture from the Salina Journal taken along Schilling, the busy road behind our house. Our fence is between the pole closest to the bottom and the second one. Amazingly, with all this damage, no one was hurt.

25 poles broke in Salina on Monday, 18 of the along the street behind our house.

Another Salina Journal picture taken along Schilling.

A picture from our back deck of our neighbor Jason's fence.

Another one from the Salina Journal website showing the damage and the trucks repairing it right away. They worked through the night and got the power back up by 7 the next morning. Kennedy and Coe is on the same power grid as us, so when the power goes out here its out there, too. It went out around 11 monday morning and the whole office was out of commission until it went on again th enext day.



So the weather was okay the rest of the week, kind of cloudy and spitting off and on. We started hearing reports that itwas supposed to snow like four inches on Friday and we were like okay, whatever, four inches of snow this time of year?



Well...the paper this morning said that there is so far 6. And we're supposed to get 1-2 more inches before one this afternoon.



We should probably start listening to our weathermen.

After I conned Mike into cleaning the grill out for me last weekend I left it open so the birds woudln't nest in it again...but I think I"m going to have an even bigger mess to clean up now.

Our deck, completely covered.

The front steps

The kiddos had fun watching Daddy scoop the snow before he left for work this morning.

The drifts going up to the front door went up to Brian's knees. He stuck his arm in the snow at a low point on the drive and it went up to his elbow. The wind was pretty heavy so it was drifting a lot

The front walk about an hour after Brian scooped...recovered! He knew he needed to shovel the drive because there was no way either car was getting out. He got stuck anyway because they hadn't scooped our street. Usually, it takes Brian about 2 or 3 minutes to drive to work. This mroning it took him a half hour because he kept getting stuck!

Noah "No-pants" and I watching the snow last night after he came in from playing in it..and sliding down his slide into it!