Hey guys, I wish I can give some comforting news about my upcoming finals and that very soon I will be out for summer to again start focusing on art. But at the moment, I can't be entirely certain.

Just recently, we had a very weather issues. It only started with a big of the usual nasty weather, you know just heavy rain and hailing, but then we got tornado warnings. The first time, not a whole lot of us took it seriously just by the way they handled siren warnings and the usual "The sky is falling!!" attitudes we commonly get when it comes to tornado warnings. If you yourself practically grew up in the Tornado Alley, you often don't take tornados as a huge deal. Here, the weather is very bipolar, so we usually expect as much. Now this isn't to say we are not entirely cautious of tornados, we are, and we understand what they can do. We just do not panic once we get an alert by them, and the news tends to make the warnings VERY exaggerating. However, come the second day we had another storm warning and then a tornado warning. This would be the second time we waited around the television awaiting for the word to move down into the cellars. This time, it was serious. All the news kept repeating was just how massive the tornado was, to the point that my grandmother began to panic. So to ease her nerves we went down into the cellar, me, my grandmother, and my two cousins. Meanwhile my parents stayed up in the house watching the news. For most of the time we just sat down in the cellar, listening to the THUNK of hail hitting the metal chained door as they gradually got louder and louder then suddenly ease up then again loud and mighty. Finally my parents came down with us, and we could hear the 'roar' of the tornado and the higher screech of the sirens. It wasn't exactly in our area, my Dad told me, but it was still close enough to hear it and they would better be safe than sorry. After while later, the hail and rain lighted up and the sirens stopped. We couldn't even hear the tornado anymore, so we got out of the cellar, my father first. He checked the news and we found out that the tornado had passed us. All piling out quickly from the dingy cellar, we listened closely to the news again. We come to find out the tornado has hit an elementary school, full of young students underneath its debris. I felt sick, as the cameraman showed a bunch of parents running towards the crumbled school, and felt somewhat anger when the reporters tried to pull some of them aside to talk when they clearly have more important things on their mind. Then we heard the tornado hit a hospital (one I had to go to once before for surgery), and gave minimal damage to a theatre. The next nearly made my heart jump into my throat, when I heard almost an entire neighborhood, one of plenty of friends families and students attending my same highschool, got critically damaged. When the helicopter's camera hovered over the neighborhood, I was shocked to find most of the houses completely gone. Just...gone!

Finally the tornados vanished, and families started calling left and right, donations quickly began for the suffered families, call on low water supply, and I felt such grief I had to crawl in bed to hopefully sleep away my major growing headache. Later I began making calls to my friends and family, asking if they are alright and if they needed anything to make sure to give my family a text (since most of the lines were busy) if they needed help. Because of this tragedy, my school gave an alert to all students and parents via text telling us that they canceled a school day for the students that lost their homes and families. I am glad they decided this, but worried because that only reassures me that most of the students had lost so much in the tornado. Originally we were going to have today and tomorrow as review days for finals on Thursday and Friday, but now we may only have one day left before finals (maybe not even that they could even cancel tomorrow and delay the finals).

Conclusion? I feel very drained right now. I'm tired, upset, and confused just by all this insanity that went down in just two days. But I am very relieved to hear from some of my family and friends that survived and with minimal damage, although my worry continues for those who had suffered from this event. My friend and I thought about painting for donations and just giving some of our stuff to those who now have very few. I'm sorry if this may be inconvenient for those who had waited a very long period for me to be more active with both art and journals, but there's nothing I can really do at the time. All I can say is to please be patient, my finals will come sooner or later eventually and I will be able to post more artwork over my extended free time. Also please pray for the families that have suffered and lost so much this week.