It's a Twister! And a flood, and hail, and...

What weather we’ve been having! All year it has been weather system after weather system! We started the year by having 70 tornadoes (all on one night) in January. That was followed by an ice storm, followed by another bunch of tornadoes in February, and then the BIG ice storm.

Then the flooding began. Branson had some very bad flooding when the Corp of Engineers were forced to open wide the gates of Table Rock Lake above the town. Water levels in the lake broke the record numbers. Here's a picture of the lake level at the top of the dam.

It rained all day two days ago (it's the same story about every other day) - Parts of Springfield got 7 inches of rain in about 5 hours. There were many flooded roads, some we could drive through in the truck and others we weren't even about to try to cross. Our average amount of rain for the year is 46 inches and we've already gotten 36 inches.

Our garden has fallen victim to a hail storm attack. Quarter-sized hail squashed our squash! Our Zucchini, cantaloupe, strawberries, lettuce, and tomatoes also took on some damage but I think that we should still have a pretty good "crop". Last August my brother Matt stayed with us a week to help with work and just have some fun. He also helped me can some of our tomatoes…Matt, I think I could use your help again this year! Ha, ha! This is before the hail:




Here’s some pictures of the various weather and aftermath of the weather:

Lake Taneycomo flooding Branson

Our Driveway (good thing we moved the car up the hill!)

Some of the trees in our backyard. The trees in the area took a really hard hit and they continued to fall until the ice finally melted. We had a tree on the house but there was no serious damage.

We cooked our breakfast on our porch using our camping equipment as we had no electricity. It got really cold in the house!

You can see how thick the ice really was!

Hmmm, do we dare cross it?!

Our Backyard with the hail.

Oh, so I thought I might include a strange/interesting incident of the day (on the days we have them). Today we got to remove a frozen badger and two red foxes from a house. We donated them to a taxidermist. He was really excited to get them!

4 Year Anniversary!

Well, I'm a little late in writing about our anniversary. It was actually last Thursday, June 5th, but I still wanted everyone to see the fun stuff we did.

We had a great, relaxing anniversary - We camped in Montauk State Park (here in Missouri) and went canoeing on the Current River. Our "real" anniversary trip will be in August when we return to Glacier National Park in Montana, where we went on our honeymoon. Joel and I really fell in love with this area when we were there four years ago. While we are there we are going to be hiking and camping in the "back country". We are super excited about returning but we needed to wait until August so that all of the areas would be snow-free.

We canoed from Akers Ferry to Pulltite which is a 12 mile trip, we took our time and spent a lot of time playing with the fish on the river. For our anniversary Joel bought an amazing underwater case for my camera he got me for graduation. We took a lot of pictures of fish using the camera, goggles and snorkel. Towards the end of the day we saw the most exciting sight of the trip - 20 Paddlefish. They averaged about 4 feet long and the biggest one probably weighed 25 lbs. Unfortunately they were in pretty deep water, so our pictures aren't great. This probably won't be as exciting for most of you as it was for us, but it has been years since they have come up the river and this was definitely a once in a lifetime opportunity for us.

Here's a better picture of a Orange-throated Darter in his spawning colors.

Alright, enough boring fish stuff. Thanks for all the great anniversary wishes!

Jennifer

Welcome to My World!!

Wow! Time really flies and there are two things I have learned. The first is that you can never get it back and the second is that as time goes faster it becomes harder and harder to keep up with everyone. And so, this blog (never thought I would be a blogger) is an attempt to keep you all up to date on what all goes on in my crazy life. I hope you enjoy reading!