Alarming

I woke up at 3:30 this morning wondering why 1. The cat had embedded all of her claws in my head and, 2. Why there was an ambulance in the bedroom with us. As I finally started to be come coherent I realized the tornado siren across the street was going off.

Well shit.

I scrambled out of bed, threw a sweatshirt on backwards, stumbled into sweatpants and found my socks. I grabbed pillows from the bed and threw them in the hall bath. I grabbed the weather radio and herded cat and dog into the hall bath.

A colleague at work had been urging me to get a weather radio. With the nasty stuff coming in last night, I did make a trip over to Radio Shack. I have to say I'm impressed with the gadget I got. It's a Eton Red Cross Weather Radio. It has two TV bands, AM, FM and all the NOAA Weather bands. It also has a light, a siren, a cell phone charger and a hand crank that charges the NiCAD batteries if your alkalines are dead. Well worth the $49.99 I paid for it.

And yes, yes I do feel like an utter geek, but I'll be a safe geek.

Huddled in the bath with the dog and cat I remembered last March when that particularly bad storm rolled through. I remember it vividly because it was my birthday. We spent the entire night in our basement waiting for the storms to pass. At least last night it was a very short period of time. I was back in bed by 5:15 ... only to have to get up at 6:30.

On the lighter side, the danger seems to have passed. The weather frogs are now predicting colder temps. Oh joy.