Our first big storm

Sorry to our friends in Memphis but this post will be old news to you.  Some of you will notice your pictures on here too as I once again had to turn to my wicked ways of blog theft(Actually I asked for permission this time). Our camera battery was dead and since the storm left us without power we couldn't recharge it.  We have some pictures that we took on our phone but I couldn't find the cord to transfer them.  I'll add those pictures later when/if I ever find the cord.   Anyways, so we had a big storm system sweep through our area a couple of weeks ago that was exciting/scary to see.  Most of the greater Memphis area was left with broken branches, uprooted trees and no power.  Our suburb seemed to have been hit particularly hard and we later found out that an F1 tornado had touched down briefly.   Becky and I however weren't able to see the full brunt of the storm because we weren't home when it happened.  I had just finished up work at the school and was waiting for Becky to finish work.  I had heard from someone that a big storm was moving in to the area so I decided that it would be a good idea to watch from the 3rd floor balcony of the school tower.  I was enjoying the wind and rain until I saw leaves and little branches flying around in the air and then I saw the metal lid of the garbage can 5 feet away from me get sucked out by the wind.  That's when I decided to go inside and watch from one of the windows.  The tornado sirens came on and they made all of the students and faculty that were still at the school at the time go to the bottom floor in an area away from all windows and doors so needless to say I didn't get to see anymore of the storm.  When we got home we realized that the power was out.  It was kind of exciting at first and we lit some candles and carried flashlights around but that wore off after about 15 minutes.  I really wanted to watch the Stanley Cup final which was being played that night.   We actually didn't get power for another 48hrs which wasn't very fun but it was a good learning experience at the same time.  We realized that we weren't really prepared for that type of emergency.  Although we had food, we had nothing to warm it up with and because of that we ate out for almost every meal except for Sunday when some of our friends with power invited us over to dinner.   So now a little propane stove is on our must have list.     
This is a tree in our apartment parking lot.  That back end of the truck that you can barely see belongs to a member of our ward who had just bought it a week earlier.  I bet he was feeling pretty lucky!

I guess the storm was just as angry as I am about the rising gas prices

This was a pretty common sight for several days after the storm