Weather, Weather, and Glorous Bad Weather,

For many who are on CKCB Design Team and participate they have read my undying passion for Bad Weather on my May 2 post!  Love it and the adrenaline rush I get!  Heck I've always been an adrenaline junkie since I can remember.  Barrel Racing with my first two horses as a teenager, swimming on a swim team as a child and teenager, showing our Arabians, and I get the same rush when I walk in the show ring showing our cattle although no speed to it....nice and slow.  But what really sets me off into a huge adrenaline rush is bad weather.  At the same time I need to know I am as safe as I can be at that moment.  Like you will find me running for shelter as soon as I hear thunder because of almost being struck twice.  My husband shakes his head when I'm following chasers live,  Chaser TV.

I promised to get some photos I got as Larry and I drove into a severe storm just north of Calvert in March.  I'm sorry I didn't get the PL Page done on this one but will eventually.  Only four pictures worth printing and one is pretty blurry but thought I would share a great wall cloud with no rotation in it.  They are taken with my iPhone and we didn't stop the pickup so they show bleary.

Great wall cloud!

Looking north hard to see structure but wall cloud to right of the photo.

Really blurry but the wall cloud itself from middle to right was pretty awesome.

Finally underneath the cloud deck with the wall cloud headed northeast and away from us it now looks to have developed a hail core in the storm.

Then I thought I would share day before yesterday some photos online I found which are awesome of a warm air funnel in the Manvel/Alvin area of Houston.  A short hop from our Houston area home of 20 miles and no I didn't see it but this funnel was absolutely gorgeous with the way the light was hitting it.  Saw one of the photos on the Weather Channel yesterday of this funnel and another coming out of the same wall cloud.  A warm air funnel is the land version of water spout.  This storm was never tornado warned.  No damage occurred.

And a close up:

So cool and so pretty!

The next two photos of about 17 or 18 are a storm I chased in April 2011.  The first photo from my porch at the ranch in Central Texas.  Just awesome structure to the storm and just had to run down the highway to see what the storm would produce. You can see in the haze of the second photo the tornado.  Had to pull the tornado out of the photo by enlarging it then cropping.  The tornado touched down briefly in Coolidge about 15 miles north of where I took the photo.

Final photo to share with you is an awesome photo taken last August by James as we raced home so we wouldn't be rained on.  I have other pictures as we waited for our take out order from Chili's at our Houston area home but not as awesome as this one!  By the time we were a couple of miles from the house this thing was meaning business.  Great structure and rotation in the storm but no funnel emerged.

Hope you enjoyed the trip through just some of the wonderful photos in my collection of weather!

Cloud Gazing

Whoop two posts in one day!!!  This one is for this month's Imaginisce Blog's Monthly Challenge!  I am so excited about this one!  No red!  Tough to do in the month of love, but hey when your following the rules it's easy!

1. Create a layout/card, etc using the sketch above as your inspiration.

2. Use THREE different patterned papers.

3.  NO RED is allowed on your project.

4.  Theme: LOVE

5.  Remember you must use at least 75% Imaginisce product on your creations.

Here's the sketch!

With a 5x7 photo to scrap I dropped it down so I could build my own thunderstorm going on in the upper right hand corner!  I used papers from the Love You More Collection and Hippity Hop Collections!  I get to see so many things happen around me at the ranch and it reminds me why I love being a rancher.  One week after I graduated with my Masters (Summer 1982) I went through my first hurricane, Alicia.  I've been asked over and over from my urban friends what I would be if I wasn't ranching.  If I had to choose as I think back it would have been meteorology, the study of weather.  Yet when I analyize it the catalyst that sent me down the path to my love of  BAD weather was Hurricane Alicia.  They say you forget the true sound of the wind after seven years.  Yes, at around seven years I stopped waking up in the middle of the night when the wind picked up, but the sound I have not forgotten.  The images out our windows I do not forget.  Feeling the slab of the house vibrating I have not forgotten.  In the late 90's I remember seeing my first tornado up towards Sugarland and I was living in Rosharon at the time at the Darrington Unit.  I had been trained as a storm spotter while I worked at TDCJ.  My second tornado was a storm I chased down the road from the ranch two days before the killer tornado that hit Joplin in 2011.  The next day I had to leave our ranch because of a super cell that produced F1 tornadoes that touched down on TSTC's campus in Waco and the other in downtown Groesbeck.  When I left the ranch I stopped in Groesbeck to pick up a Doctor Pepper and headed south to Thornton where I came out from underneath the cloud deck to see one of the most amazing super cell thunderstorms I had ever seen.  I was memorized and wishing the mesocyclone on the south side of the storm would have dropped a tornado, but it didn't.  And yes our ranch was ok upon my return.

Last week a line of storms developed to the east of us and I sat on the porch after dark watching the light show occurring some 50 miles away.  I got to see my very first positive lightning bolt.  That was so cool!

This is not a picture of the storm that day.  I was so stunned by the shear power of the storm I forgot completely to pull out my camera.  This storm is to the NNW of our ranch about 30 miles in the summer of 2010.  It was popping lightning like crazy and so pretty at sunset.  To even get this photo I had to turn on the flash or the cloud was drowned out.  I added the chipboard key painted with Tattered Angels Pink Lady Glaze to get the exact effect I wanted and to portray that a farmer or rancher is very in tune to weather because we rely on rain to grow your food.  Then the bunny added is to remind me of all the great wildlife I get to see on the ranch including the cottontails and jack rabbits. 

Our ranch just off the peak of the highest hill in the county allows me to truly enjoy my passion for bad weather.  At the same time I am overly mindful of just how dangerous bad weather can be because I have had that hair raising feeling just before a lightning strike.  I head for indoors or the car quickly, but I spend the entire time running from one window to the next to watch the clouds.  Living in Cental Texas allows me to enjoy my passion for severe storms.  And some day I want to do a tornado chase vacation...bucket list!

Thank you for taking the time to look at my layout!