Well, my New Years is usually fairly boring. I haven't been a wild and crazy party girl since high school so I planned a bit of shopping with Amanda followed by dinner at my place.

  Yesterday morning, Pj opened all of the windows in the house to let in the 56 degree air while we straightened up our bedroom. Livvie was playing with my hair brushes on the bed while I hung up clean laundry and suddenly, the tornado sirens went off. Ever since I was a little girl, I have been terrified and fascinated by tornados. I thought at first that they must be testing the sirens but the local news station corrected me. We were under a severe weather warning. We gathered up pillows, the cats, cell phone and a fully packed diaper bag and headed for the basement, where we watched the weather channel for updates.

After a while, we realized that the tornado was actually about 50 miles south of us, so we hung around in the living room until the storm got a little closer. Sounds insane, but that's how we do it here in Missouri. The news says "There's a big friggin' tornado and it's heading right towards your house!"  So Missourians go outside to see if they can spot it. After several phone calls to friends and family and about 2 hours, the storm passed us by without so much as a few lightening strikes and a bit of rain.


Surrounding cities, including a few in St Louis county were hit very hard. Many homes and businesses were destroyed and so far 6 lives lost. Several small "rain-wrapped" tornadoes touched down throughout the course of the morning.  It's very common to have tornadoes in March-July (and sometimes a little off season) but tornadoes in late December is very strange!

  Once the storm passed, the sun came out, the birds sang and grazed for worms and we had a beautiful day. It was a very unexpected end to this ridiculous year!