We’ve been having unseasonably warm weather for the past week. Yesterday, it was once again 65 and sunny. As I scraped away at wallpaper upstairs (my motivation is back with a vengeance), I remember thinking “we’re going to pay for all this nice weather”. I really wish I had been wrong about that.

At about 5:30pm, I heard the wind suddenly pick up and looked out the window, surprised to see the neighbor’s garbage cans flying down the street. I dropped what I was doing and hurried downstairs. The lights were all off and it was pitch dark. As I came down the stairs, I heard glass shatter. Wind was ripping through the house – both the french doors AND the side door in the kitchen had blown open. The floor was covered with 1/2 an inch of water and little piles of hail. I quickly got the side door closed and locked, then struggled with the french doors. A pane of glass had broken – when they flung open, that side had hit an exterior light and shattered it to pieces. We had two deadbolts on the doors, but both had ripped out of the wood! I had to stand there holding the doors shut (with a number of power tools plugged in and soaking in the standing water on the floor) until the wind died down, which luckily only took a few minutes. The storm left as fast as it had come in.

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