I have to say it was the most pitiful, sorry little excuse for a tornado that you'll ever see. That is typical of what we get here.

Our emergency guys were tracking it when it was just getting warned in Cooke County so we all were already on alert with all our firefighters reporting to their stations and our storm spotters in place long before we got a warning.

Our warned storm cell is now making trouble in counties east and northeast of us, so watch out if you're in Marshall, Bryan or Johnston County right now.

Scott, thanks for watching out for me and P-Mac, thanks for checking on me.

I figure your the last person on here who needs to be warned, but one of the most likely to see a warning. It at least makes me feel a tiny amount of satisfaction to post it.

Scott, I appreciate it. You never know. One day I might be out in the garden without my phone or fire radio and I might stroll casually into the house and log on to the computer....and there your warning message will be! I always try to remember to take my radio and phone with me, but sometimes I get absent minded and forget both.

As a side note, KXII-TV Storm Chaser, Chad Vandever (or it may be Vandiver) whose video feed was live at TVN Live Chasing, was near the Durant, OK Tornado-Warned cell, streaming live, when a scream was heard and his live video ended abruptly. Apparently he got a little too close to the rain-wrapped tornado and it hit him. His truck has damage from debris but apparently he is okay.

I don't think the Durant storm is from the one that passed through Love County. I think it was from the second tornado-warned cell in Cooke County that was headed towards Callisburg about the time our tornado was winding down.

Our Tornado Watch expires at 9 p.m. and I am glad. It is stressful to have to watch and stay alert for hours and hours and hours.

I'd like to think I'll be out working in the garden tomorrow, but may have to learn how to walk on water in order to do it.

And....our pond that stopped holding water permanently after several years of drought dried up the spring that fed it now looks like a pond again. It is full and overflowing. The overflow pond downstream from it is full and overflowing into the swamp that hasn't been swampy in years. The swamp is full and overflowing into the creek. The creek, of course, flows down to the river, which is full and above flood stage at the Red River bridge. I know all this abundant water is temporary and won't last, but having all the water makes this place feel more like home again. I don't think we've been this wet overall since 2007. The garden is suffering, but everything else looks great.

I almost asked about your pond the other day, if it had water in it again. We can all hope this temporary water will recharge our water supplies for a while. Lake Hefner is up four feet. Sadly, it is still not full, but I am not complaining. I'm not sure we could take too much more water. Although the weather guys say there's another round of rain to go before Monday....and the prediction was in inches.

Was 2007 an El Nino year?

I love having water in the pond, but since it had been empty for so long a lot of trees had sprouted around it and now it looks like a Louisiana swamp with trees standing in deep water.

Was 2007 an El Nino year? It was! That one was 2006-2007 and it brought us drought recovery from the 2005-2006 drought. Then, the 2009-2010 El Nino helped us recover from the 2007-09 drought.

I've been hoping for another El Nino year for so long and now I am questioning my own sanity. While El Nino usually brings enough rain to break even a long-term drought, I think I forgot how destructive El Nino can be.

I don't know if the scientists have decided yet if this is expected to be a particularly strong El Nino, but based on what we've seen so far this year, I think this one is acting a great deal like the really strong El Nino of 1997. All I remember about that year is a cool summer and we were flooded all the time, but we lived in Texas back then. I don't know if Oklahoma got all the rain that year similar to what we had down in Texas. Of course, many conditions combine to give us (or not give us) rain, and it is about so much more than just whether we are having an El Nino or not, but all I know is that when they declare an El Nino, I rejoice over the drought relief and simultaneously worry that the garden will drown. Is that not a perfect description of this year? Love County is back in the white on the U. S. Drought Monitor for the first time in 3 years and my garden has inches of ater standing in it.

The QPF for the next 7 days has been pushing the heavier rainfall further and further south into Texas. That's helpful for those of us who don't need a whole lot more rain, but we'll still get plenty/too much and I fear Texas will have worse flooding than they're already having right now if the QPF is anywhere close to being right.

It is looking like a hard spring for gardeners all across the southern plains.

And, I always thought El Nino brought drought relief to California. So far, that's not happening this year.

Pretty sure 1997 was a wet summer. I seem to remember it raining so much that we couldn't do any fieldwork for quite a while. Once it dried out the crab grass was thick enough to make hay.

Dawn this isn't your weatherman is it? This guy is on KSWO in Lawton/Wichita Falls.

OSU Engineer, Good Heavens, No! If you want to make that video really entertaining, turn on the closed captioning and try to make sense of how it interprets what he says.

We have great TV mets at our local CBS affiliate, KXII-TV, Channel 12, with broadcast studios in Sherman and Ardmore. They cover the Texoma region on both sides of the Red River, which is a pretty large area and they do an impressive job. I have a very high degree of trust in them because they are so good at what they do. The best thing is that KXII, a few years ago, made a huge financial commitment to this area by purchasing and installing their own Doppler radar, and we are exceedingly grateful to have Doppler radar here, instead of having to rely on it from an area much further away. Our TV mets (the channel has 4) are very good and very experienced, with three of them (Tom Miller, Steve LaNore and Tom Hale) each having over 25 years experience. The newest member of the team, Wava Denito, is an OU grad, and couldn't be at a better station to learn from guys experienced in our local weather. She is a great addition to the weather team. No matter what the NWS says, I'm always watching KXII to see how our local mets describe what they think will happen or is happening.

Our most recent serious tornado touchdown was an EF-4 that crossed the western edge of Love County in February 2009, damaging a few structures, before it hit Lone Grove in Carter County, just west of Ardmore, killing 8 persons and doing a lot of damage. KXII was all over that storm well in advance, warning us for some time before that the tornado-warned storm was tracking from TX, coming our way, and expected to cross the Red River at the western end of our county. Their storm chaser, who at that time was Doug Drace, was out there in his chase vehicle giving us great warnings, and in fact, he was so close to where the tornado ultimately touched down in Lone Grove, that he had to back off a little bit and wait for it to get ahead of him or it likely would have come down right on top of him. Their top-notch coverage, along with warnings from the NWS, gave everyone in this area plenty of advance notice so people could seek shelter. Most of the deaths occurred at a trailer park that was just demolished. I believe one death was that of a trucker on the interstate who may or may not have known the area was tornado-warned. We don't get the huge numbers of tornadoes down here that y'all see up in central OK, and I am exceedingly grateful for that. The four tornado warnings we had this past weekend are more than we have in some years, and we still have a lot of year left in 2015.

Now I'm not saying our weather guys are perfect. The storm chaser who chases storms for KXII and does live reporting apparently got too close to the tornado in Bryan County the other night, while reporting live, and his truck was either severely damaged or destroyed, and viewers were calling and texting the station wanting to know if he was okay. Apparently he wasn't injured, and I bet he'll try to stay a little behind the tornado next time instead of getting underneath it. I think it was rain-wrapped, and that may have led to him getting too close to it.

I don't know if this is true for the rest of y'all, but our family has its own weather team in Texas, where our friends and family get scared by our constant severe weather warnings and start texting us all kinds of helpful info....their radar, what their TV mets down there in the D-FW area are saying about the storms up here in OK, live video from TVN Live Chasing's website, etc. Sometimes I think they are watching our weather even more closely than I am. We start getting weather warnings from friends down there sometimes even before the NWS has issued a Tornado Warning for us. That's not a bad thing....an additional "heads up" or two doesn't hurt us any. It does scare me if they start texting me maps showing TVN storm chasers on a road near our home, though. If you're sitting in a tornado shelter under a tornado warning, you don't necessarily want to know that storm chasers are a quarter-mile away, hoping to intercept the tornado that you're hoping isn't coming your way.

I grew up in Texas and we experienced some storm damage there over the years, but nothing that happened there really comes even close to what happens here. We have learned to stay weather-aware all the time, which wasn't the case when we first moved here.

For us, unless the rain stops falling immediately, the rainfall this year is going to be a lot higher than what we had in 2007 and that is a scary thought because we had far too much flooding that year.

Dawn