Last summer, the city put in a new park about a mile away from us. They must have installed some civil defense sirens there, too, because when they went off today they seemed louder than I had ever heard them.
I was in the attic, taking advantage of the warm weather to put away those ornery Christmas decorations. It was raining really hard. When the sirens went off I turned on the television for the update. Basically they said, "There's a fast moving storm with "rotation" coming right toward you. Get to your "place of safety" right now." I wonder how many people's "places of safety" have cable, because once I get to my place of safety, I just have to sit there and wonder if it's over yet.
I love how the radar is so fancy now they list out the subdivisions and tell you when it's going to hit. "Looks like Berkeley Walk at 2:43, and then Liberty Downs at 2:44 and then Cottonport at 2:47." This tends to give me a false sense of security, like, 'Oh, I have at least three more minutes. Let's go outside and see how big the hail is!"
Many of my neighbors have basements and they always tell me that I'm welcome to come over in case of tornado, but I never feel like running across the street in the rain while the sirens are blaring like I'm Auntie Em running to the root cellar. When all of us are here we go to Greg's closet. By 'we' I mean me and the kids because Greg never comes. He's always standing on the porch going, "I don't see anything yet!" and acting in general like he's impervious to natural disaster because he once survived the Northridge earthquake and also saved all his brackish water fish by holding on to their sloshing fish tank through the whole ordeal.
Today, I turned the television up so I could hear it through the door and sat in the powder room surfing the Internet while waiting for things to blow over. I always feel stupid sitting in the closet or whatever, but I think I'd feel more stupid if I were sucked up by a tornado and spit out a mile down the road, dizzy and probably naked. While I sat in the bathroom the school called and said they would dismiss 30 minutes late due to severe weather. I was bummed, actually, because we're trying to make up some karate lessons we missed over the holidays and if the kids were late, we'd miss class.
When the sirens stopped a neighbor called and sortof frantically told me that she had a friend who was inside the school who called her and said that they were releasing kids to parents, but they were going to lock the school back down because of another storm and I should go pick up my kids right away. "I don't know," I said, "I wonder if I pick them up could we make to karate in time?" I guess I wasn't concerned enough because she said, "Did you not hear the sirens earlier? Go get your children!" I hung up and then decided it was best to go with the emergency plan already in place which says they ride the bus home.
It was a good thing, too, because the bus dropped them off exactly four minutes later than usual and we made it to karate class right on time. Not only that, but the kids had been released from school without going back to class for their personal belongings, so we got one more automated phone call from the school announcing that the entire school was exempt from homework for the evening. And there was much rejoicing.