Plague No. 7

. . . and the hail smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field.
~ (Ex. 9:13; 18; 23-25)*

Ah, Kansas. As if tornadoes aren't enough, now we have stuff like this falling from the sky:

(Cat included for scale.)

I guess that's what they term "golf ball-size hail." I looked around for a golf ball, but couldn't find one to compare. And it just kept coming and coming. At first it was just rain, but what rain! It was beginning to look like a lake in the back yard, and then it started hailing. Pieces of ice bouncing off the windows and the sidewalks, tearing holes in the leaves on the trees, and a couple of branches came down.

Bob went out to clear one of the gutters and came back in soaking wet, with a bruise on his foot from being struck by a piece of hail.

My car was in the garage; his was outside. We went out and looked, and only saw one small dent, on the roof. There may be more, it was kind of hard to tell while it was wet, but I think he escaped with not too much damage. The basement is another story. Water came in the window well and ran clear across the basement, soaking everything in its path. We spent a couple of hours down there getting boxes up off the floor and trying to soak up the worst of the water with towels. We've got a fan blowing down there now, to hopefully dry things out.

Man. I didn't think we were going to spend Sunday evening cleaning the basement! At least we brought up half a dozen trash bags of stuff to throw away--mostly wrapping paper, appliance boxes that I'd saved, things like that. I had a bunch of old towels down there that we used to soak up the water. I told Bob I'd be happy to throw those away, too, but then, they did come in handy this time and might in the future, too. So I'm washing them now to save to use as rags for the next catastrophe.

Pyewacket was a little disconcerted by the noisy storm:

I didn't camp out at the bookstore Friday night, but I did go to Border's around noon on Saturday. They were sold out of the newest Harry Potter, which annoyed me at first--why in the world wouldn't they have bought enough to cover what I'm sure they knew the demand would be--then I thought, well, they may only get a certain number. I heard a clerk telling someone that they expected a new shipment Tuesday or Wednesday. I went to Barnes & Noble, who were also sold out, so I figured, oh well, I'd just pick one up sometime next week.

Then I went to Best Buy to shop for Bob's birthday present (I didn't get it there, but I can't say what it is until his birthday--Thursday--but I'm very pleased with what I did get), and they had them there. Plenty of them. I think they were a couple of dollars more than what Border's had them for, but I was willing to spend two or three dollars not to have to go looking again. Then, later, I went to Target, and they had them there, too.

I haven't started it yet, but I plan to tonight.

*This is interesting: The ten plagues. I was looking to see which plague hail was. It was the seventh.