What Now

BLOGGING IN THE DARK

- I was fortunate enough to have the iPad charged during the past few days, so I wrote about what was going on and then emailed it to myself once the power was restored! It's not all that gripping, but it kept me from getting bored! :)

April 27, 2011

Have you ever been woken up by a tornado siren? I don't recommend it. It's bad enough that the siren has bad connotations, i.e. Being a harbinger of a giant, whirling cone of death and destruction, but it is also frigging loud. It's probably less than 200 yards away from our house, so when it goes off...we know about it. Fearing for your life like that really puts a spring in your step no glass of Ovaltine can match, though.

It was early, but Steve and I dressed and turned in the TV to catch our awesome weather coverage. I swear, the weather men around here can follow storms like nobody's business. They know the time and place that one will strike with such accuracy, you're almost tempted to believe that they are the ones who set them in motion. Seriously, our state has awesome weather guys.

I'm glad to say that even though the world around us was seemingly disintegrating, the weather in our neighborhood stayed pretty stable. That probably sounds callous, but I don't mean it as such. Because we kept our power, once I was finally able to get in touch with my mom (who was fine, by the way) I could tell her what the weather men were saying about her neck of the woods.

There was one funny incident that I know I can't do justice, but once our power actually did go out, I was reduced to listening to the radio on a tiny FM thing I'd bought on a whim at the Dollar Tree. the radio station was allowing people to call in and tell them what was going on, since most of the stations had lost radar feed by that time. One guy, who had a very country accent, called in and said "Yeah, I'm standing out here on Sanderson Road, and there is golf ball sized hayle out here! *thumpthumpthump* jeezzus chryst, that there was baseball sized hayle! Did y'all hear that? jeezuz chryst!". I wish I had a clip of it to embed, because it was so funny!

That was the last thing that was funny, though. The longer I listened, the more depressing things got. Apparently, my hometown had taken the brunt of some very nasty weather. Things I'd grown up seeing, landmarks, places I'd grown up with were just "gone." That word got to be pretty scary after a while. So many people were calling the station to say things were "just gone." It was sobering.

The worst weather we had over our way was some freakishly heavy rain that maybe only lasted about 15 minutes. The rest of the time the sky was just cloudy and weird. A one point, some clouds right over our house seemed to almost boil, kind of like that scene in independence day when the alien ship entered the atmosphere. Creepy.

This doesn't do it justice. The clouds looked like someone was stirring them.

We also had a bad couple of hours when we couldn't get in touch with Steve's dad, and we'd heard that a big tornado had practically started across the street from him. Turned out that it was just a cell tower issue, and that he had fallen asleep and didn't hear the phone ring.

I also have to thank my best-good friend Kenny, who kept me as up to date as he could on what was going on after our power went out. He lives in Auburn, so he was able to keep watch on the weather and information being reported that would be of use to us, and send it to me by text message while he was twitter reporting about Tuscaloosa. Thank you, Kenny!