And the snow turned into ra-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-in...

Faster than a speeding bullet.  Quicker than flies on manure.  This year went by really, very quickly.  And here we are, on the last day of this year which has had plenty of ups and downs!  I won't go into all the details there, because you've probably already heard them all.  Suffice to say that while we lost some things this year, we also gained an awful lot. 

This New Years Eve has been, really, unlike any other I've ever experienced.  When's the last time you had 65° weather and tornadoes ripping through the Greater St. Louis Metropolitan Area?  Well, that's exactly what we had earlier.  I hadn't even heard that we might have anything other than some rain, so we weren't even prepared for anything like this!  We were sitting here in the back room reading and thinking about doing some painting when the sirens went off.  We knew it wasn't the first Monday of the month, when they do the normal testing of the sirens, so we turned the teevee on and sho 'nuff, as soon as we turned it on Channel 4 went into their famous "STORM MODE!!!!!!" ™.  There had just been a tornado touch down north of Rolla, and some really bad-ass stuff was heading our way.  When all was said and done, aside from that touchdown, there were tornadoes in Robertsville, Fort Leonard Wood, and even Sunset Hills here in town, at Lindbergh and Watson.  That is way too close to home for me - only about 5-10 minutes from our house!  I think there were about 20 houses damaged - 4 completely leveled - along with countless cars destroyed, a few churches and schools mangled, lots of telephone poles down, etc.  It was all pretty freaky, but it literally went through here in about 2 minutes and we're all better now. 

So now it's off to some really low-key "festivities" at the house of some good friends of ours.  We're just gonna have some lasagna and ring in the new year with some games maybe some football on the tube.  We may even be home in time enough to try to remember the words to "Auld Lang Syne".  We may even get all crazy and break into that Dan Fogelberg tune (which, by the way, is about a gal named Jill Greulich, who happens to be a school teacher here in the St. Louis area.  TMYK. Feel free to use that in a trivia game).

For tonight's stroke I grabbed just a smidge of some red, green, yellow, orange and blue.  Figured it'd be perfect for all of the fireworks that'll be going off tonight!  You guys be all safe and stuff out there this evening.  We'll get home in one piece, then start the new year off right tomorrow.  It'll be a good year, I can feel it.