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!