Hail

Saturday we had storm warnings all day.  If I had a nickel for every time I got up to listen to a weather alert from the weather alert radio, I would be rich - or at least I could have a nice lunch out.  It seems that there were several fast moving storms and each time one would threaten a new county, we would get another alert (even if said county was an hour north of us and the storm was moving northeast).  It seemed to work out to a new alert about every 5 minutes, for much of the day.

Finally we got tired of getting up to listen to the alerts (actually M got tired of getting up, I had given up and gone down to the basement for a while), and turned the radio off.  We'd been getting alerts all along but nothing more than clouds and an occasional raindrop.  Well... about an hour later, we got our storm, complete with hail.  

The hail was lumpy and bumpy and only lasted for a few minutes.  Then about 15 minutes later, we got round 2 - lots more hail and lots of rain too.  And pretty smooth round hail:

15 minutes of hail and 3/4 inch of rain later, here's what our deck looked like:


and the front yard

Luckily we didn't get any tornado action here, but we did get bits and pieces of limbs and such down.  I'm really glad we got those dead pine trees taken down in the fall.  Our front yard smelled really piney - "like a Christmas tree" according to the kids.

Almost as soon as the hail passed, the weather started to clear up.  The clouds were clearing and we saw blue sky (at least in patches).  However, the internet was still out all yesterday evening....  Today it was back and we had a beautiful spring-like day.