A night in the basement

It is early Friday afternoon. I am home for a needed day off, and Asher is supposed to be taking a nap. He is actually laying in bed singing a series of increasingly cuter songs he is making up, trying to get me to go up there. It's not really working. We have had a fun daddy-Asher day so far. We went for a drive in the country and to the grocery store, and played trains.

Last night was a rough one. A really nasty line of severe thundertorms rolled in in the evening. The alarm on the weather radio kept going off with tornado watches and then warnings. We stayed up watching a movie, and the worst of the storms began to hit after midnight. At almost one, the radio and the TV said a tornado was coming toward our town and to get below ground. That cell went by about 7 miles north, then another one appeared and passed by just a couple of miles north of us. Sarah and Asher ended up sleeping in the basement, but the weather radio kept going off and waking Asher up, so I took the radio upstairs and tried to sleep up there. When a new warning comes out, the radio fires up with a loud alarm (a review I read said it sounds like a European ambulance in your room). The alarm continues until you go over to it and push a button, then it tells you what is happening. It is a little annoying, since it is set to go off every time something happens in our county, but brings a lot of peace of mind, since the tornado sirens are hard to hear indoors. It turns out there is quite a bit of storm damage, especially in a town called Attica, 40 miles or so southeast of here. There is also a lot of heavy flooding around the rivers. Everything is fine here, though, and the sun is coming out now. The weekend should be nice. I am definitely not used to these Midwestern storms. They are spectacular, but I'm still really freaked out by what tornados can do, especially after the F-5 that hit Parkersburg last Friday.

We got an aquarium with some fish from a friend of Sarah's who is moving away. Asher is really excited about the fish, and wants to feed them every time he sees them. He loves to find them all, especially the fast yellow one and the big black one that likes to hide. Speaking of fish, I went back and found the pond I was looking for last weekend. It is a beautiful spot, and the fishing was really fast, although all the fish were bluegills.

Asher is awake now, and he wants to play, and also to see pictures of himself. He likes this one.