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 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.

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):