As many of you may (or may not I guess) know a huge storm ripped its way across the Midwest last night. Here in St. Louis the TV had a ticker showing the tornado warnings across the bottom of both the National Championship game and American Gladiator. (Thanks to my husband that was the programming we were watching last night.) Tornado warnings always catch my attention because until we moved here I had never even seen a warning on the TV. Growing up in the west you just don't get the conditions for tornadoes. I guess there had been a few in Washington where I grow up, but they had never actually touched down in my recollection. There was also that weird tornado in Salt Lake while I was going to college, but it seemed more like a weird fluke. Here we see them often in spring and fall, but not often in January. I noticed about half way through Gladiator that there was a tornado watch for St. Louis county and St. Louis city! Since moving here there have been many tornado warnings in the viewing area of our TV station, but not ever for us. In fact, since moving to St. Louis I have noticed a funny trend for the most severe weather. It pretty much breaks to the north or south before hitting the city limits. I like to call this the St. Louis effect (or is it affect? I can never get those two right). Needless to say I brushed every thought of tornadoes to the side.
Another thing to make the weather not such a big deal was that our county just had a tornado watch. In my mind that's a step down from warning. I did however call my mom to let her know, because nothing says I love you like your mom halfway across the US worrying about you. Then, when I didn't get a great reaction from her I called my sister to let her know, but I didn't really play it up since I didn't want her worrying.
As we finished watching Gladiators and the game seemed to be loosing momentum I started to watch the warnings more clearly. This was my first big mistake. Actual tornadoes were being spotted in the county just next to ours. Never mind that counties are pretty big and I shouldn't worry about the one next to ours, red flags started to appear in my brain. Dan wanted to watch a movie since he wasn't tired and there wasn't anything we wanted to watch on TV. I told him then I wouldn't be able to see the weather report. So I decided we could watch the movie and I would put the weather report on the computer. Mistake number two. As Ocean's Thirteen progressed I checked back in with the weather every 15 minutes. Swirling winds (which in my mind meant tornado) would show up looking like they were pointing right at us. Then the St. Louis effect would start to come in to play and they would either lose energy or go to the north of us. All this paranoid tracking got me convinced that our house would be hit by a tornado sometime before 5 AM when the tornado watch was over. Not only that, but we would be sleeping in our beds, on the top floor, in rooms that were exterior to the house and thus we would all be killed.
I was very nervous when I went to bed. In fact I told Dan that we should sleep with Charlotte in our bed so that she would be safer. Also that we should sleep with the radio on so that if anything was coming we would know. Turns out that Charlotte doesn't sleep if she's in the bed with us. She plays with our mouths. After a good 20 minutes of mouth playing she went back into her own bed. Plus, I decided that Dan was right and we didn't need to sleep with the radio on. At 1:49AM I awoke to the flash of lightening and crash of thunder very, very close. Then I heard strong winds and driving rain. So in my panicked state I went to the front room and turned on the TV. Turns out that the St. Louis effect is very strong and all the station showed was thunder storms for the whole viewing area. I went back to bed and slept very soundly. I didn't even notice when Dan tried to get up at 6 AM. He said that there was still lightening, thunder and rain at that time so he went back to bed until 7 AM when it had passed. What a storm! Too bad we slept through the whole thing.
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2 comments:
We just got that same storm from you. We are lucky enough to only have the tornado warnings Northeast of us thank goodness. Our back yard did almost flood though. I did the same thing when I heard about the tornado warnings and text my whole family. hee hee. I always felt much more safe in Spokane.
I'm glad someone else thought to first make their family worried!
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