and it all came tumbling down

The past few days have been horrible. My fever had vanished by Sunday afternoon so I thought I would start to feel better... wrong... I felt worse... Monday was a holiday. When I woke Tuesday feeling worse, yet, I went to the doctor after taking Kyra to school. I have a sinus infection and an ear infection, as I suspected. I still felt bad today so I stayed home again. I hope that after two days of antibiotics I'll feel well enough to go to work tomorrow.

Last night, for the hundredth time, the right half of my closet shelf system collapsed. It started doing this over a year ago and each time I've been able to prop it back up. I even bought a new closet system many months ago with the intention of replacing it, but that has sat in the garage until today. The collapse this time was beyond temporary fixes. So, thanks to the Sudafed high, I had boundless energy to remove all the items in my closet, completely dismantle what was left of the shelving, and then install the new system! Of course this took me all day to do, but at least it's done!

But before it was finished, there was the Tornado warning and hail storm. I had taken a break from the closet project to cook dinner. I had just thrown pasta into boiling water when the Tornado warning for our area came on the TV. Kyra started to panic and began crying. I turned off the stove and told her to take the dogs down to the basement while I gathered a flashlight and weather radio. She was worried about Tiger, our cat in the laundry room, so I grabbed her too. Our basement isn't finished but is divided into two halves. One half has a door and windows that face the backyard. The other half is separated by a wall with two solid doors, and has no windows. Of course we went into the non-window section and closed the doors. Since Tiger doesn't get along with the dogs, I carried her down and put her in her crate, which I keep in the basement. Then the big challenge was keeping Riley from getting into too many of the objects that are randomly stored down there. Kyra was still very worried, but I distracted her by having her play fetch with Riley. This brought a smile to her face and kept Riley from chewing up her stuffed animals and toys that are stored down there. When that got old, we played with silly putty since the play-doh was all dried up. And then she had fun putting a toy horse saddle on Riley (pictured above). We listened to the hail pound the house and waited out the storm. The warning expired at 6:30 p.m. Kyra had never experienced hail before, so we went out into the backyard to see if any remained on the ground. We found golf-ball sized pieces of ice all over the yard! I didn't see any obvious damage to the house and am glad I keep the car in the garage!

I had to start over on the pasta and Kyra was paranoid that another tornado warning would be announced since we were still under a "watch" until 11 p.m. But thankfully, that was the end of our storms.