It's been one heck of a year and I'm glad to see it go!

Less than 30 minutes to the New Year and looking back, I'm glad it's finally ending even though it seems to have gone faster than ever. It was a really difficult year though, pretty much from the beginning when my adopted dad started getting worse on Natalie's birthday. He died 9 months ago, on March 31st, of lung cancer. I miss him very much and think of him often. Of course, that loss for me just made the loss of my parents (not to death but to prison due to their own extremely selfish actions) even more difficult to bear. The weather added to things with spring being delayed and then when it did come, it came with severe weather. We had a close call when the tornado sirens went off in early April but nothing came of it thankfully other than severe hail damage on the southside of town. I was very grateful that John was sent home early and he came home just before it all hit. That wasn't the case six weeks later. I had been aware that we were to get severe storms so had stayed home and had been watching the weather all day. I had this sense of dread during the afternoon, felt very anxious. Kept watching the radar and saw a storm off to the SE that looked bad. It was and this storm was heading right for my town. Warnings started popping up in the SE so I started to get things together in preparation for going down to the basement with the two girls John was still at work. When the sirens went off (late, I found out later), we all went down. This time the warning was for real. The southside of my town took a direct hit from a rain wrapped tornado. This happened just an hour or so before Joplin Missouri was hit. Thankfully, it was a fairly week tornado. If it had been the size of the one that hit Joplin, we would have taken damage and loss of life similar to theirs, I'm sure. The tornado touched down not very far from the hospital and there were numerous stories of close calls. It hit near the neighborhood I had lived in when my brother-in-law was killed so I have had a hard time dealing with that. Tornadoes have been a huge fear of mine since losing my house to a fire when I was a kid and that combined with what happened in that area back when I was living there just made it worse (ironically, while houses on either side of my old apartment took damage, the house I lived in was untouched). It was just really weird to see all the damage down there and to realize that I was less than four miles away. It could have just as easily hit where I lived. Still kind of freaks me out, in all honesty.

So those two events and some other struggles have made this a particularly difficult year and so I'm not sad to see it go. I'm really hoping that this next year is a much better year because I kind of need a break here!