We had a major storm system go through our area tonight.. You could see this wide band of cloud stretching across the sky coming our way.
The view from the ground.

What it looked like on radar

We had high wind which suddenly dropped about 10 degrees in temperature (from 31 to 21, it felt quite nice!) and then the rain came! In half an hour we had 1cm of rain come down very hard with driving wind.

One local weather sensor station reported wind gusts of over 70 km/hr. At least one tornado came from this system that touched down near Guelph. (UPDATE: Final count was 8 tornadoes)

Overhead.

So I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.. We had a rather loud visitor who stopped by for an hour or so. At around 3:30 AM a big thunderstorm came through our area. The lightning was some of the loudest I have heard in years. Amazingly, Ellie slept right through it all! This is especially amazing because just walking by her room is enough to wake her up sometimes. The storm gave us about an inch of rain in a short time, so it was really coming down. Thankfully it wasn’t as bad as it got a couple of weeks ago..

ISSUED BY ENVIRONMENT CANADA TORONTO
AT 10:05 PM EDT MONDAY 10 JULY 2006.

2:38 11 KILOMETERS PROBABLE TORNADO; PILOT
EAST SOUTH-EAST OF REPORTED FUNNEL TOUCHING
OWEN SOUND AIRPORT DOWN

2:58 WOODFORD FUNNEL CLOUDS SPOTTED HEADING
TOWARDS MEAFORD

This is where we live. In the past few weeks there have been quite a number of tornadoes touching down in Ontario with a few in our area (Owen Sound, Woodford, Meaford) and at least two people were killed by tornadoes in Ontario in the last week. Some of our camp staff actually saw the funnel clouds forming. Not something you want to see around your house (a prefab double-wide trailer!), especially when you have 140 campers and camp staff around too.

So last week I purchased a weather radio.

It is able to listen to Environment Canada’s weather radio service and let you know what is coming. More important than that, it has an alarm feature that will sound if there are any public warnings issued. It is programmed for our specific area so I don’t hear the alarm for other areas, and it is loud enough to wake you in the night if something is coming. So this will hopefully give us some warning and enable us to get ourselves and campers to shelter if needed.

The weather radio service has alarms for just about everything, from tornado warnings to flash floods to amber alerts (child abduction), to tsunami (not a problem where we live), to radiological hazzard, family reunion warning, blizzard warnings (definitely going to happen here), iceburg warnings (!), evacuation alerts… 75 alerts in all. It is really a comprehensive service.

Paranoid? Maybe. Common sense? Yes, I think so.

Today I learned how to tie my shoes:
http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm

After church on Sunday, we packed up and hit the road back to Ontario. We spent the first night in northern New Brunswick in Edmundston. The next day we drove the rest of the way to Owen Sound (about 1200 KM). We had a few delays on the 401 as there were thousands of cars making their way back to Toronto after the first long weekend of the summer. There had been some very heavy rain from thunder storms throughout Ontario, so we lost about 2 hours stuck in traffic and taking side roads to get around it.

The long line of stopped cars behind us. According to the news this line stretched about 60 kilometers.

Ellie playing peekaboo with my mom in the back seat of the van on the way to Ontario.

After a very long drive we were happy to be home and able to sleep in our own beds. We returned in the early morning hours of Tuesday, four weeks to the day we left for the staff conference and our vacation/deputation. It was fun, but it is nice to be home.

This past weekend I spoke at my home church, Main Street Baptist Church, here in Sackville, New Brunswick.

It is interesting to see how the Lord works things out. I chose to speak on 1 Timothy 3. The youth pastor at the church also chose 1 Timothy 3 for his teen class, so the youth of the church heard two messages on the same small passage from a very big book. As Pastor Scott put it, “obviously the Lord wanted the teens to learn something from that passage today.”