May 4, 2007, Pt.1

We woke up around 5:00 that morning, like all weekday mornings. We were all clean, dressed, and at the breakfast table by 7. That was the rule.
We only had the one vehicle, my truck, so I dropped Rick off at work at 7:30, and Isaiah and I went to work, he with his book bag full of home school books.
I was cleaning rooms at the Best Western J-Hawk Motel at that time, a job I loved, and that fit into my schedule perfectly. Isaiah would sit at the desk in whatever room I was cleaning and do his work. We were usually done by noon, and we would pick Rick up and go home for lunch. Isaiah and I would take Rick back to work at 1, and then finish his schoolwork.

I had dinner in the crock pot that day, so after picking rick up at 5 we started working in the yard.

We had spent the previous few weeks working very hard on the yard and garden. We cleaned 20 year old trash and leaves from under evergreen bushes, trimmed the bushes and the trees... We had even cleaned up a nice sized patch of gooseberries and they were blooming. We spent hours mowing our 1/4 of a city block. That evening, I mowed around the garden and garage, and Rick drug trash out of the 8 foot tall lilac bushes that had lived for 50 years at the northeast corner of the house.
Our garden was all up and growing beautifully. We had yellow wax beans, green beans, zucchini, carrots, radishes, chamomile, catnip, two kinds of pumpkins plus the tiny ornamental pumpkins, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and even birdhouse gourds.
In the front yard, I had flowers coming up - multi-colored zinnias, barbie-pink giant zinnias, black hollyhocks, blue morning glories, blue and black bachelor buttons, and giant sunflowers.

May 11 was Isaiah's birthday, and one thing he had wanted was a rose bush. We had bought a beautiful red rose bush, and spent some time that evening planting it in the front, right next to the porch.
Before dinner, Rick and I spent some time sitting on the front porch, just talking about how things were so good, after 23 years things were going our way... We had the perfect house (for us) we loved the neighborhood, the neighbors (Rick's best friend lived next door).
We went in to dinner about 7, I had fixed black-eyed peas with tomatoes, onions, garlic and lots of Cajun seasonings, one of our favorite things.
Dinner was over about 8, and it was then that we noticed that it was getting stormy in the south. We turned on the radio (we didn't have cable or satellite, and out here that means no signal at all) and Rick went out to put up the gardening tools.
The radio announced a tornado watch, our area included. At around 9 it was getting rough, and I asked Rick to go ahead and cover the birdcage with the birds' blanket and put it down in the closet under the basement stairs, just in case, and bring up the cats' pet taxi.
"Why," he said, "It isn't going to do anything."

"Humor me," I told him,"Just in case."

So the birds were moved, and the pet taxi was ready for the cats.

About 9:30 the sirens went off. We got the cats, the dog on his leash, and were headed downstairs when Lauren and her boyfriend came running across the front yard with their dogs. All 5 of us and our assorted animals went downstairs, Isaiah and I with the animals under the stairs, Lauren, Patrick and their dogs in the bedroom north of us.
Rick, however, had to go back upstairs to "see what was going on". Typical Kansas man.

When part of a bathtub came flying in through the kitchen window at him, and he could look out to the south and see the neighbor's 4-horse trailer about 5 feet off the ground rolling through the air towards our house, he decided it was time to get to the basement.
(to be continued...)

Pt.2

Pt.3