Post by erzulie on May 31, 2006 17:30:59 GMT -5
Well, an ironic thing happened to me today while I was in the chat room talking to Annie and Lauren. For those who don't know, I live in Illinois (in the US), Annie lives in Liverpool, and Lauren lives in South Africa. We were talking about the weather in our respective areas and I told them we might get a storm here later. I happened to mention that we sometimes get tornadoes with our storms. I wasn't expecting to ahve one today, I was just giving a general description of what the weather can be like here. Of course they don't have tornoades in England or South Africa, so Annie and Lauren naturally found the idea of tornadoes terrifying. I assured them it wasn't that bad, and the conversation moved on to other things....and then, quite to my surprise, the tornado siren went off (it wasn't even storming, but for those of you who don't know much about tornadoes, they can happen when it's not storming). I hastily told Lauren and Annie that I had to go because there was a tornado, and then I quickly shut my computer off and dragged my protesting cats to the basement. The initial report was pretty scary--my dad heard on the radio that there was a tornado on the ground in town right next to where my mom works. My mom works in a day care in a part of town that's just now being developed, which means 1. There are no big buildings or tall trees to block the wind; 2. The day care is built out of pressed wood (or, as I prefer to call it, glorified sawdust) and would not hold up if there was a tornado anywhere near it, and 3. The day care has no basement or really anyplace where you could feel even remotely safe during a tornado. Naturally I was pretty worried about my mom, but it turned out that there was not a tornado anywhere in town, there was just a funnel cloud close to where my mom works. The only actual tornadoes were in towns south of here, so after sitting int eh basement for a bit and reading a book while my cats begged me to let them go back upstairs (the basement is pretty cold and generally not the most cheerful part of the house, so they hate it down there), I went back upstairs and resumed my life. The irony of the whole thing was that I was just talking about tornadoes to Lauren and Annie, and then I had to leave them because of one. They probably thought I was either joking or in grave danger, but neither of these things were true! When I realized how terrible the situation might have looked to them I couldn't help laughing, but I feel bad that I may have freaked them out. So Lauren and Annie, I know you're probably sleeping now, but I want you to know that everything's fine here and I hope you didn't worry!