THIS WAS WHAT HIT MY NEIGHBORHOOD!!!!

That dreadful day, August 21, 2011, the day Goderich fell to an EF3 tornado, I was sound asleep in my bed. The phone rang, and my mother was frantically trying to get a message across. In my half-awoken stupor, I struggled to understand what she was trying to tell me, until my fogged up mind finally registered the following:

Let your dog inside! There's a storm coming!

I asked my mom where she was, and she was only 10 minutes away from my house. I opened my bedroom curtains, and to my horror saw a rotating ring of low, loose clouds. This phenomenal celestial tragedy was moving towards my house, and with adrenaline I ran downstairs to the kitchen door and let my dog inside. I called my sister downstairs and told her to look at the window, and we both agreed - IT WAS A TORNADO!!!

My sister, my dog and I all ran downstairs, and 5 seconds later the entire house began to shake, all this accompanied by a loud high pitch roar that sounded like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a blender. I looked out the tiny basement window, and to my surprise it looked like a blizzard was going on outside. Was this it for my house?

Once the noise and shaking ended, my sister and I walked upstairs and were relieved to find that our house had been left unscathed. We looked out the windows, stepped out the doors, and found everything in the neighborhood to be a mess. Dozens of major branches as thick as my waist had been snapped off their mother trees, and garbage bins and plastic chairs were scattered all over the street and sidewalks. Thankfully, not one house had its roof damaged or window broken, and I concluded that my neighborhood must have been hit by an EFO or EF1 tornado. That was when I felt my ego turn to dust - I didn't have a camera handy to record any of it.... DAMMIT!!!!!!!

This is exactly what the beast looked like, although it was in my neighborhood and not in some field:

Amazing...