Survival of the Ignorant

This is a picture one of the locals took of a tornado that touched down on Friday.

We successfully survived our first tornado this week. The only thing we know about tornadoes we learned from the movie Twister, and that didn't help us at all.

So the story goes like this: Friday night we are in the kitchen preparing dinner and decided to turn on the news, as we sometimes do. The meteorologist comes on to tell us that a

The official warning.

tornado watch had been issued for the entire Kansas City metropolitan area, and a tornado warning had been issued in a few counties, including Jackson county where we live. For those of you who may not be familiar with the difference, a watch means that conditions are favorable for a tornado and a warning means that a tornado is imminent.

The view of the storm out our window.

We weren't sure if we needed to panic or not, so we decided to be calm for a bit. Our composure lasted for a little while until the community tornado sirens sounded. The funny thing about all this is that we looked out the window and we couldn't even tell that anything was going on because it wasn't raining and the wind wasn't blowing. 15 minutes later we finally saw something exciting when an ominous wall of low-flying clouds covered the city.

After a few inches of rain and absolutely zero tornado sightings, we realized that there was really nothing to worry about. Later we learned that a few tornadoes did form and touched down south and east of us. One was only a few miles away, but they didn't do much damage and, as far as we know, no one was hurt.