Just under a week ago, we were struck by some very serious storm cells across our area.  This morning, they struck yet again.

Tupelo was hit by an high-end EF2 tornado, maybe a lowend EF3 around 8 am this morning.  The farm store we visit, Scrugg's is sitting without much of their roof...and a whole lot of wet merchandise inside (the roof damage triggered their fire alarm sprinklers...).  The several wood and tin storage buildings in their lot for sale were splintered into parts -- a section of 2x4 was literally implanted in the exterior of the block building.  Several semi-trailer storage trucks were flipped about the parking lot as well.

One of the buildings at the Furniture Mart, near the airport, was twisted and pulled apart as well.  Several trucks along HWY 45 were rolled, and sadly, several of the huge oaks along the front of Lowe's were totally uprooted and ripped to pieces. 

I know, it is a true blessing no one was injured.  That section of Tupelo is major business-dense.... Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Lowe's, Scruggs, The Mall at Barnes Crossing, MDOT headquarters...you name it, it's in that 4 mile section there.  It could have been a terrible thing had it occurred later in the morning.  But, the trees...we aren't talking some normal trees here.  These were century old beauties....most close to 3.5 ft in diameter.  They have lasted countless storms over their lifetime, not to mention they withstood the building and populus explosion of developers in that area.  Now, they are simply scrap.  I hope they at least are salvaged for useful wood and not merely chipped up like the rest of the storm debris.

By noon the cells had drifted over into Alabama, but there have only been reports of wall clouds that direction, somewhere around Winfield, and some nasty lightening and heavy rains toward Birmingham.  Luckily, they lessened in strength as they continued east. 

I thought the news channel would have some of the photo's they have shared today online, but I sure can't find them there.  LOL....our "digital source for news" seems to be a bit behind the 'digital' times, I guess.  Oh well...if you've seen one up-turned tree or semi trailer, I suppose you've seen them all.

Here are some photo's online -- mind you, I have dinosaur-dial-up here so I've only seen one of the photo's shared.  I know nothing about the content of any other photo's shared here.

Here is The DJournal blog with some photo's of the storms as well...

And the iReport sharing...and his photo's are on CNN, also...

If anyone comes across better ones, let me know.  My mother and Grandmother are having conniptions up north as the Weather Channel shared some of our storms, which promptly set my phone to ringing this morning with questions as to exactly where we are in the county, what we planned to do if the storm blew this direction (it did skirt right over us with nasty clouds, but nothing more than hard rains and a ton of lightening), etc.  Grandmother's worry, you know.  And a Grandmother 700 miles away with Weather Channel access and a road atlas is not a good thing!

I was reading about the new log splitter sitting over at FaithFarm, and that sparked my interest in checking out the sawmill ideas Dewey has been playing with for a couple of years.

I found this little site on making a homemade chainsaw mill.  I'll print it off for Dewey tonight.

Of course, is there anything you can't use for the BackWoods Home Magazine?  Probably not....here's a link to their article archives...

Then I was talking to a friend earlier this morning about sewing machines.  She was going to take hers in to have it cleaned and checked out.  I will admit, I have taken the fancy-schmancy Janome in for 'looking at' when it has acted up on me. Normally, I wouldn't even think of paying someone to look at my machines, but this one was far too expensive and still under a great warranty, so it only cost me a bit of time and some gas (which wasn't that much at the time). 

There are so many things you can do yourself with your sewing machine.  Most problems are really a simple matter of cleaning the machine properly.  One of my repair-shop fixes was for a huge amount of lint under my bobbin case.  Duh...I had just done a batch of flannel diapers and hadn't even considered picking out the bobbin case to get at the lint bunnies hiding there.  It jammed up my machine and I took it in.  Had I been charged for that little amount of work, I'd have been steaming!

Here is a site for help in maintaining your sewing machine yourself.  At the very least, try these easy solutions before you pack it up and head to the repair shop.  While you're there reading that one, check out this main section and view some more of the helpful PDF files!

Leighann....there is a great one on altering patterns ;o) 

And something to inspire you on the homestead, gleaned from an article on Backwoods Home: