I was hanging out with some friends last night when we noticed a huge storm approaching Austin. We flipped on the Weather Channel and watched the radar, which sure enough, showed a massive storm headed our way. And you know you're in for a ride when there's black on the doppler radar. Doppler radars are supposed to be different shades of green, the occasional white, and sometimes yellow. But you never want to see pink, red or black.

In most storms, lightning flashes are brilliant and come and go rapidly. But last night's storm had the weirdest lightning I think I've ever seen. It was blue. And it wasn't flashing. The sky would literally turn blue for a second or two. Then it'd go black again. Then it'd turn blue again for a few more seconds. This repeated sporadically throughout the storm.

It had been raining off and on all night, so that wasn't really all that out of the ordinary. But right around the time of the blue lightning, the wind ferociously picked up. And right as the wind picked up, the hail started. I don't mean the tiny hail that usually hits but actual golf ball sized hail. I don't know the wind velocity, but you could literally not see one foot in front of the window because the wind was blowing the rain and hail sideways. It was like a sheet. I've never seen anything like it.

We went into the inside most room of the apartment and waited it out. Turns out that it wasn't a tornado, BUT I read today that in essence, it kinda was. We didn't have a cyclone that touched ground (which technically makes it a tornado), but we had almost all of the other pieces needed. It's as if someone made a cake but failed to put it in the oven.

So anyways, I headed home not long thereafter, not thinking much of anything. Oh, I forgot to mention that the power for much of the city had gone out, so we got to watch this massive storm from the creepy, candle-lit vantage point of the 18th Century.

The roads were trashed...just absolutely trashed. Besides the fact that none of the stop lights were working, the roads were covered with fallen trees and debris from the storm. I could not see the pavement in front of my car, the streets were that covered in debris (mostly leaves).

So I get home and most of the people in my apartment complex were hanging out on the catwalk. My next-door neighbor told me that I should probably go check all of my westward facing windows, because his had been completely blown out. Turns out that nearly all of the westward facing windows in the entire apartment complex had been blown out.

Sure enough, mine were too. Now, I know this is bad, but honestly, it could have been a lot worse. The window in my bedroom had been blown to smithereens and there were golf ball sized pieces of hail on my bed and all over my dresser. Our computer desk faces this window, but everything seems to be okay. The desk shielded a lot of the room from getting damaged, so that's good. Our iPod, video camera, and computer all had condensation on it, so that wasn't good. I dried the video camera and iPod and turned them on. They seem to be okay, so hopefully, we dodged a bullet on that.

So I spent the rest of the night (from about 12:30 - 3:00) picking up pieces of glass out of everything. We have glass everywhere. A lot of the glass has been picked up, but I'm sure that we'll be finding tiny pieces of glass for days to come. Although Parker's in San Antonio with Anya, this worries me. I'll channel my Marine days and see if I can get it completely clean by the time they get home.

I nailed a large comforter over the gaping hole in our bedroom and hope that it does the trick. I'm going to re-enforce that situation later with some garbage bags and other rain-stopping measures.

So yeah, was a pretty momentous evening. Pictures are below:

- Matt