You never know what is going to happen in a day's time. Today, we and our neighbors experienced a microburst during a particularly severe and long lasting thunderstorm. Quite suddenly, the winds became exceptionally strong, like hurricane force. It scared us, and I immediately sent the kids into a closet. There was nickel sized hail for about 20 minutes, torrential rain lasting nearly an hour, and hundreds of lightning strikes.

About 6 o'clock, after the storm subsided, I went outside. Fortunately, we experienced no significant damage. But our northern neighbor lost a very old live oak tree, and our southern neighbor lost a similar tree. We just had a lot of items blown over and around, including our umbrella table and chairs by our pool. I was very, very thankful that we didn't lose any of our huge mighty oaks. Our southern neighbor shares a transformer with us, so the power company had to come out and de-energize it, knocking us out of power for a little while, until they finished working. The tree had fallen into the overhead line at our neighbor's yard. All is back to normal now, except for the sad loss of beautiful trees. Fortunately, nobody was hurt.

Now I realize how damaging a thunderstorm can be, even if there are no tornadoes. It was really something.