Yesterday

I'm honestly not even sure where to start with this one. I realize its been a very long time since I wrote on here, yet again...and there's lots of other stuff I'd rather tell everyone about, but this is what I've got. A tornado hit our house yesterday.

We are all ok...Barkley was at "daycare", Zach and I were actually out (I'll tell that whole story in a bit), and when we got home we found Bastet asleep on a pillow. Our house is mostly ok, broken windows and doors and and a good bit of mess. Our garage, on the other hand, is gone. It collapsed on top of Zach's car. The car, however, appears to have survived with only a few dents and scratches, but we'll know more when we can actually get to it. Our neighborhood is a disaster zone. The mayor of Minneapolis has declared a state of emergency in our area of the city. Last night they enacted a curfew of 9pm and only residents were allowed in or out, not that that is a very easy task at this point. North Minneapolis is a very old neighborhood, most of the houses were built in the early 1900s, so the trees on the roads were HUGE, and now they're gone; fallen on top of houses or across the road. You can barely walk five feet without a tree blocking your way, and driving is out of the question. There is no power in our neighborhood and we're not sure when it will be back. We have heard that they are "hoping" to have it restored to "most" of the area by tonight...but that seems almost impossible. They are going to have to pull miles of line and cut down hundreds of trees to get it through...so we'll see.

So here's how our day went yesterday:
We got up and had a pretty normal morning...ate some breakfast, talked about the plan for the day. Barkley had been going nuts for a couple of days, bored and hyper. It has been raining and he hasn't gotten to go out a play much, so we decided to take him and drop him off at daycare for a few hours while we go to the grocery store. We dropped him off and headed to Walmart, which is, more or less, on the other side of town. As we were driving, the weather started getting pretty nasty and then we got a call from our alarm company. The upstairs back door was open and they wanted to know if we wanted a cop sent. We were pretty certain that the wind had blown open the windows, which then blew open the door, so we said no. We decided we should probably head back home and close it, just to be safe. Little did we know what had actually happened!

As we were discussing the "turning around to go home" the weather took a turn for the worse. It started POURING rain and hailing. Zach couldn't see to drive so we pulled off the highway and found a parking lot to sit in until it passed. At this point I pulled up the weather on my phone and found a tornado warning. I opened it up and read maybe the scariest words I've ever read: a tornado has been reported at I-94 and Dowling. I-94 and Dowling is EXACTLY where our house is. Dowling is one block south of us and I-94 is about 5-6 blocks west...it had dropped, from what we could tell, on our house.

We both more or less freaked out. The rain had let up enough that we could drive again so we started heading home...which was a challenge in and of itself. I-94 has been closed down all weekend for bridge painting...so we now had to find a different way home. As we were driving, we started hearing tornado sirens. I pulled up the weather again and there was another tornado warning...heading right for us. Zach found a Target and we ran inside and were sent to the back of the store with everyone else. For what seemed like an hour (but was probably only 5-10 minutes) they held us at the back of the store. When we were finally given the "all clear" we took off for home.

As we got closer and closer to our neighborhood, things got worse. We started seeing trees down and debris. As we crossed the bridge into our neighborhood, shock set in. The coffee shop on the corner had taken major damage, the billboard on top of it was ripped off and there were bricks on the street. Windows were broken in all of the stores. We only made it a few hundred feet on the main road (Lyndale) before we were stopped by road blocks and police. We took a quick turn into a gas station to head down another road and encountered another cop roping off the road. We found out later that a woman had actually been in her car when the storm hit and had been killed. We asked the cop what was the best way to get to 37th and Dupont (our house). His response, "your guess is a good as mine". And now we were REALLY scared.

Zach took off, trying to find any back way in we good...but we were constantly blocked by huge downed trees, power lines and debris. Finally, about 5 blocks from the house, we gave up and abandoned our car and started running. We turned down our alley and panicked. It was a disaster...the garage 3 doors up from ours had actually been lifted up and dropped back down in the middle of the alley. We got to where we could see our house and it was terrifying. We could see the destroyed garage and the backyard was gone, lost under a mountain of trees. Zach went running, both of us yelling for Bastet. He ran across all the trees in the back and headed in the backdoor. I couldn't get through and fought my way around front, both of us still yelling for her.

Both the back porch door and front porch door were blown in and there was glass everywhere. The windows were broken and our giant tree out front was laying across the road. I made it to the front, yelling for Zach and Bastet. I could hear him yelling inside but couldn't tell what he was saying. He finally made it to the front door to let me in and told me she was fine. She was upstairs on her pillow asleep. I ran up and found her there, curled up in a little ball like nothing had happened!! At this point, I completely broke down...we both stood there and held her and cried.

We put Bastet in her crate and locked her in the bathroom and went to survey the damage and be sure all our neighbors were ok. Everyone on our street came through it fine physically but several houses didn't. One of our neighbors, Gary and Cindy, had a tree go through the back of their house...and they have no insurance. We are praying that FEMA will come through for them. Our other neighbors had varying levels of tree damage, some more, some less. Overall we know we were very lucky...everyone on the street came through uninjured.

Our landlord Lindsay arrived an hour or so later and we started trying to figure out "what next". There was obviously no power to the house and a gas leak next door. We decided to try to get the house where we could secure it (i.e. boarding things up and actually putting a 2x4 across the back door since it was the only option to keep it closed) as that seemed critical. A couple of people around had taken the opportunity to add drunk to stupid and make a dangerous situation...so we wanted to be sure the house could be closed up.

We called Barkley's daycare to see if he could stay the night and they were wonderful and gracious...even offering to figure out a way to feed him with his "chicken allergy" issues. We spent some time trying to decide what to do and determined we should try to find a hotel. We weren't sure how long power was going to be out for and I for one didn't feel safe there without power or any way for people to get to us if something else happened. We found a hotel that took pets and are now at the Red Roof Inn in Plymouth.

We aren't quite sure what's next. We have renter's insurance and are hoping it will cover the cost of having to stay in a hotel until we can get back in the house...but the claims center couldn't promise anything, of course. I'm scared, tired and completely overwhelmed. We are down to one car until we can get his out from under the garage and aren't sure how we're going to handle that. He works in South Minneapolis and I have class/work in North St. Paul. I have two weeks left of my quarter and Zach takes the LSAT in 2 weeks, which is adding even more stress to the situation.

So here I am...grateful to be alive, grateful that our house is still standing, but feeling lost and frightened...and that's all the words I have.