hello tornado.

when chris and i were considering moving to norman, oklahoma, my #1 concern was tornado season -- seriously. was i worried about moving to a new place? sure. was i worried about not knowing anyone and having to make all new friends? absolutely. was i worried about us not having a paycheck from a church but having to find random jobs in order to do church work? of course. but seriously, more than anything else, the biggest con on my pro/con list was tornado season. i mean, why would you choose to move to a place located right smack dab in the middle of tornado alley??? but we did... and here we are in norman.

the funny thing about norman is that every single (not an exaggeration) normanite i've talked to claims that tornadoes don't hit norman. supposedly there's a legend that an indian spoke a blessing over the river that runs to the west of norman, so tornadoes don't cross the river -- they always turn north and hit moore, oklahoma city, etc. -- people actually believe this. well, as i'm sure you know, a tornado crossed the river on friday and hit norman. thanks for the false confidence, silly normanites.

here's a video we found from friday. please note that this is directly over our little apartment -- where i was -- by myself -- completely miserable.

fortunately, although the video shows it forming over our apartment, it didn't actually touch down until it moved a little further east of us, so this was the extent of our damage:

it was supposed to be worse on saturday night, so we planned ahead -- i wasn't about to be surprised again and stuck in our apartment. we spent the night with some new friends, the mosiers. so why the slumber party, you ask?

1. matt mosier works for the national weather service here in norman -- read: inside scoop.
2. their neighbor has an underground storm shelter -- necessity.
3. matt had to work the night shift, so clearly we didn't want erin to be by herself -- this is how i sold chris on it -- i had to convince him he was being a hero.
4. they have two adorable boys -- the 11 month old obviously had no idea what was going on, but the 3 year old kept saying, "i'm scared of funder cause i'm still wittle." (um, i am too and i'm 25. oops.)
5. we've only known them for about a month and a half -- they're even newer to norman than we are! -- so why have them over for dinner when you can have a slumber party with them? i've decided this should be our new get-to-know-you plan.

thankfully, the storm that came in the middle of the night on saturday night was just a severe storm -- lots of scary "funder," lightning, and crazy strong wind -- but no tornado. on sunday morning, we decided we should all celebrate our first oklahoma storm survival with some yummy donuts! (although, personally, i feel like i deserve a gold medal or certificate or something... i seriously feel so accomplished!)