Pardon my silence yesterday.  It was not of my own doing.

We yet again were visited by severe weather.  I lost power little more than thirty minutes after I arrived home from work, and it didn’t come back on until early this morning.  I didn’t wait up for it.  Oh, and it went out just a few minutes before the tornado sirens bellowed their terrifying warning into the air… again.

Packing winds of at least 100 mph (161 kph), small hail, torrential flooding rains, a respectable lightning show, and possibly some tornadoes, this marked the fourth week in a row for North Texas to get its collective butt kicked by Mother Nature.  This time, however, she was quite serious.

As of this morning, more than 300,000 people were still without power, more than a dozen regional electric towers had been blown down, everything not bolted to the ground became a projectile weapon, and some areas looked like war zones.  In fact, I was surprised to see that six or seven trees had been blown over in the parking lot at work.  When I arrived there, some were still where the winds had left them, while others had already been moved to safer locations and out of the way of traffic.

Although I’d like to claim I secreted off to some exciting destination for the evening, or that a debonair Prince Charming had swept me off my feet for a passionate and memorable evening, neither would be truthful.

So I was knocked off the intertubes by nothing more exhilarating than severe weather.

And for those I’ve heard saying this repetitive beating we’ve received in the last month is nothing short of extremely unusual weather, all I can say is they’ve obviously not been in Texas for more than three minutes.  I’ve lived here for decades and find nothing out of the ordinary about all of this.  Dallas is in Tornado Alley, is it not?  And severe weather is the reason we have civil defense sirens that respond to weather warnings, right?  And the cliché is that anyone who doesn’t like the weather in Texas should wait five minutes, eh?

No, poppets, this rash of tornadic and destructive weather we’ve had these past weeks is, in my mind, nothing to blink at.  It seems to me that we’re seeing a bit of our usual spring weather and nothing more.  Remember, last year we didn’t see measurable rain all spring, and that was extraordinary.  This year, on the other hand, we appear to have found our normal footing… at least so far.