weather

An update for those of you who do not keep up with me on Twitter or Facebook. I am alive. Our house is undamaged. Those of you who know my street address will understand why I am broadcasting this message as widely as possible. I was very close to the EF-4 tornado that took out a chunk of East Limestone County as well as the Anderson Hills subdivision in northwestern Madison County.

I was able to rescue Tenzing from the vet's a couple of days after the storm. The vet's had a narrow miss from the multiple massive trees and power poles that got knocked down on Wall-Triana, but all animals were safe and cared for.

Jeff is safe with his family.

To my knowledge all friends of mine in the Huntsville area are safe and accounted for. There is grave damage to our infrastructure.

I am cutting lots of quilt fabric while we have no power. Power ETA is Tuesday-Wednesday of next week. My area will probably be one of the last brought back up, as our damage is extensive.

I am safe and well. Not everyone near me can say the same. I am profoundly grateful.

Jacob has my passwords to twitter and facebook, as well as contact phone numbers for my family and Jeff's family. If I have significant news, I am texting him and he will then post as me on both services (signing his name to it) and contacting both families. This is being done with my permission, and I am very grateful that he is serving as a point of contact for me.

Notes about contacting me: we do not currently have electricity or mail service. Landlines are down. Cell service is minimal - I can get text messages out, but cannot make or receive calls unless I get very, very lucky. The only ways to reach me right now are text-messaging my cell phone, DMing me on my @domesticat account on twitter, or coming by my house. I am restricting my travel quite severely until the lines for gasoline become less insane. I'm staying put and loving on the kitties.

I was sitting to the right of Geof, enjoying an Over the Rhine concert that he’d talked me into attending, when I saw my silenced phone light up. The number implied Arkansas, and I had the familiar lump of dread that always came when a number starting with 501 showed up on caller ID.

It was my mother, and thanks to the ongoing performance, I had no way of answering it before the phone would go to voice mail. I watched, and waited, and saw no new voicemail notification pop up. No message.

When the musicians took a break, I called my mother back, and Geof was the only witness to the look on my face, whose look he told me later was quite priceless. The news? My mother’s engagement.

Weird. It’s not spring yet, but the chickens have all gathered outside and are screaming their fool heads off while staring at the skies. Everyone in Huntsville seems to have gotten the memo that the sky is falling. However, I feel obligated to point out some obvious things amidst the frantic clucking.

The Huntsville city schools closed at 12:30 today, provoking a mad scramble among my co-workers who are parents, in order to make arrangements for all snowflakes to arrive safely home (or to the loving eyes of caregivers elsewhere). The only problem with this scenario?

Text message sent to friends this afternoon:

All of HSV is at Wal-Mart. You’d think nobody here had ever heard of a tornado before! Hint: toilet paper WILL NOT SAVE YOU.

A few minutes later, a reply from Suzan:

No, but it will cover your ass!

Sunday morning.

The clouds are pouring in from the south; a promise, nearly fulfilled, of the rain that is coming. Hurricane Dennis will soon be making landfall somewhere south of us. We are too far north to get real damage, even from a category 4, but we will take our dousing and be glad of it, thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another?

Hurricanes make for odd storms here. We are accustomed here to weather and wind moving from west to east, or northwest to southeast. Hurricanes billow up from the south, with hard winds blowing from directions normally unseen here: east to west, or southeast to northwest. Jeff says that when he was growing up, he was always told that a storm moving from east to west meant bad things.

He’d said it off and on for years before I realized that the only storms around here that provoke that weather pattern are newly-landed hurricanes.

Some recent finds from the joys of the interweb:

#1: What Planet Is This?

From this article from the Sun-Sentinel (italics are mine):

Mark and Lisa Hiryak, of Stuttgart, Ark., who were vacationing here, said the mixture of sun and clouds make South Florida’s beaches more appealing.

“I’ve heard South Florida’s sun is different because you can’t get burned from it,” said Lisa Hiryak, although her nose was turning red from a few minutes of afternoon sun.

I think I speak for all fair-skinned redheads in this world when I say: As soon as there’s sunlight that you can’t get burned from, I’m moving there, buying beachfront property, and learning how to sunbathe. Until then, it’s SPF 3000 and parasols for me.