Stormy Weather and Healthy Eating

Yesterday was Mother's Day and a generally nice day until the storms began. We've been seeing forecasts of thunderstorms for the last week and even had a few brief storms. Last night was something an order of magnitude more severe and scary.

Our phones startled us with repeated emergency alerts about large hail, damaging winds of 70 mpg, likely tree damage, mobile home damage, and tornado warnings--all in Smith County, which is where Tyler is located. Lightning flashed all around us, and torrential downpours dumped a lot of water in very little time.

The park we are staying at does not have a storm shelter. In fact, it doesn't have any concrete buildings to shelter in, but we felt we needed to get out of our fifth wheel, so we went over to the community building. It's a metal building and so not much protection, but at least it has no trees around to fall on us.

We sat and read and watched the storms on our phones. A tornado touched down in Van, TX, which is only 22 miles west of us, and people were killed and injured. Eventually we dozed off, and around 1:00 a.m. we noticed a lull and decided to go to bed. We didn't need our flashlights to make our way home, because the lightning was still continuous.

We were lucky to have escaped injury in this terrible storm which caused so much destruction. Dick and Carol were returning from a family wedding in Seattle. Their flight into Dallas was much delayed, and they ended up getting a ride with a fellow passenger back to Tyler. Along the way they saw terrifying funnel clouds, but they also arrived home safely.

Today the weather was fine again, though mostly cloudy. We were even able to do our walking in the state park, although we had to dodge some streams of muddy water along the way.

I went with Carol this evening to the EatHealthyTyler vegan meeting. It was at the Natural Grocery, which has a community room in front of the store. The registered dietitian who runs the group has an assistant. Altogether there were about a dozen people attending, including one man.  Carol said that there were usually more.

People sat their dishes on the counter along with the recipes (sometimes with copies). We all ate and then voted on our favorites. A really delicious kale salad won.

There was no formal program this evening, but we had an interesting discussion of the benefits of a vegan diet and especially Dr. Joel Fuhrman's diet advice.