In a tornadic way

What do you bring with you when you take shelter during a tornado warning? Well, tonight when I heard the sirens go off, I set about grabbing what seemed to be the most important things. A bottle of water. A flashlight and radio. A candle and matches. My Burt’s Bees chapstick. Rob. My wallet and cell phone. And my laptop, which contains the life-blood of my dissertation. I became paranoid that if the tornado stripped off our upstairs (thus taking with it the hard drive to which my computer is backed up) and if it somehow also managed to pry my laptop out of my hands, I would be data-less and seriously up a creek. Rob, believing you can never be too careful about backing up your data, copied gigantic quantities of my files to his computer at work (which didn’t actually make me feel that safe, because I reasoned that if our house got demolished, so would his office), and also to his parents' computer (which didn’t make me feel too much safer, since D-ville seemed to be in the line of fire as well).

Now, where do Rob and I take shelter during a tornado? We don’t have a basement. On the day we were moving in, when we met our next door neighbors, they told us that we could come over to their basement during storms. Seriously, the day we met they told us that. But really… is that just one of those things you say? I wasn’t about to go knocking on their door at 10pm, when I’m already in my pajamas.

So our only option is our bathroom—its on the first floor and has no windows. When the sirens went off, we headed to the bathroom. Rob sat on the toilet seat, cooly copying my dissertation files to various computers around the state and also IM-ing Aimee (not in the state anymore). I sat on the edge of the tub and powered our hand-crank radio so we could listen to the static and the updates about the weather.

Finally at about 10:15, our local meteorologist announced: “This storm does not appear to be holding together, at least in a tornadic way,” and the tornado warnings thus expired. Rob and I looked at each other and said, “Tornadic?” then we gathered our things and ventured out of the bathroom.

The tornado warning may have expired, but its still one helluva storm raging out there. Hopefully everyone is safe. And Cathy, thanks for identifying the mystery flower in my yard. How are you with tropical plants? I could sure use some help with some of the unidentifiable things I saw monkeys eating in Nicaragua!