When it rains…

I live in Oklahoma, which is pretty much the big time when it comes to career success for a weatherman.  (Or weatherwoman life if you want exercise gender equality in the profession.)

Since I am not an Oklahoma native I find it bizarre that television program are interrupted every 43 seconds when there are strong weather patterns.

We have a tradition now when tornado or severe weather warnings are issued – we turn on the t.v. and giggle about the very pale men shuffling papers and sweating with excitement over meteorology.

(If Oklahoma is the big time, we’ve decided Phoenix is the dead-end market for weather guys.  But Phoenix weather guys are tan, so you have to balance the pros and cons in life.)

Yesterday’s storm caught us off guard!

All day long I had been getting severe thunderstorm warnings as text messages.

(I signed up for emergency text messages because I’m terrified of tornados and need to be completely prepared to wrap my body around a toilet in the event a funnel of doom visits my zip code.)

Since the sun was shining and the birds were chirping I saw no reason to change any plans due to weather complications so the girls and I were playing in the backyard.

Literally, within moments the skies darkened and all hail broke loose (like that play on words?  I did!).  The rain came down so hard I could not see 15 feet away – it was a sheet of white wetness mixed with nasty balls of ice!

We spent the evening battling power outages.  That helped me learn another life lesson: don’t try to do laundry in the midst of storms that have the potential to knock out the power.  The basin of the washer filled so many times and then switched off from power outages during the storm!  I finally gave up and just left the laundry soaking.

Thank goodness for cell phone clocks – we woke up this morning to blinking alarm clocks and a freshly bathed world.  The grass is greener, the flowers on my petunias are crumpled, and I spent the day learning about the damages to the campus as a result of the wind and hail.  (A few of our buildings created a wind tunnel so intense it busted a door and many windows out of their frames!)

The moral of the storm story is to pay attention to the weather alerts and stay close to cover.

Or just move to Phoenix, whichever makes you happier…

What’s the worst weather you’ve ever experienced?

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