Sunday night, the window regulator on the driver’s window failed on the Jeep.  This happens a lot with this model, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon.  Expecting storms that night and for the next few days, we’ve been bagging it up to keep the interior dry.  I scheduled the repair for Tuesday when I found out that the dealer could have the part overnight shipped.  Great!

My boyfriend gets home from work around 6 in the morning and stands out in the rain putting the bag back in place.  When he gets in the apartment, the storm gets stronger and the power goes out for a minute.  He goes to the living room and turns off the computer and his surge protector.  I get up and do the same.  Being unable to check the weather radar with the modem turned off, I get out of bed to look outside.  I put on a sweatshirt and go to make sure the bag is holding, because my boyfriend said the wind was pretty hard.  Bag is in place and looks fine.

He goes to bed and I sit up for a bit.  I have a sinus headache from the pressure change and I don’t want to fight with the bag again when I get to work.  I send my boss a message telling her I would be out because of the Jeep repair and the headache.  She tells me the roof of my old apartment is in the pool and we have a tree down at work.  I’m imagining it’s an exaggeration and maybe the wind blew some pieces off the apartment, and she made it sound like just the top of the tree took damage. We are without internet, which happens when there’s heavy rain, so I turn the power strip off again and go back to bed to sleep off the headache.  When I wake up, I have tons of messages.  Even one from my boss saying that my mom called the office asking about me.

Since I didn’t have internet, I couldn’t see all the pictures on facebook of the damage from the tornado.  Buildings were torn up all along my boyfriend’s route home just minutes after he got home.  It’s been bright and sunny on my side of town since I got up and you couldn’t even tell anything had happened, but the news photos tell a different story.

No joke, our old place got thrashed!

It was scary enough living two doors down from this laundry room when someone caught a dryer on fire.

For the full slideshow see the Weather Channel’s coverage of the storm.

I got a call from the auto shop just before I was due to take it in.  They can’t get their systems online and were forced to reschedule for tomorrow.  It’s supposed to continue to rain tonight and tomorrow, so the window will remain bagged.