Yesterday was a really weird day. I was getting ready and my wife had just left the house… when the Tornado sirens blew. We had been watching the weather because we were under a Tornado Warning, but it had not turned into a watch yet. There was an area of rotation that was being tracked… but it was way further south of where we live and as such my wife left mostly because she was hoping to beat the rain because the storm had yet to actually arrive. I was still fighting an Asthma attack so a bit under the weather, which made scrambling around the house a bit onerous as I tried to coax the cats into the laundry room. Thing is by the time the sirens were blowing, the news was already reporting debris in the air effectively verifying that there was a Tornado on the ground. We are fine… our house is fine… this is not our neighborhood… but there is about an eleven mile path of damage that the EF1 Tornado did passing less than a mile from where we do actually live.
As soon as it was light, I went outside trying to see if we had any roof damage, because while the storm was passing… the wind was pretty freaking wild. I thought I saw damage and as such called the roofers that put on our new roof a few years ago. They just so happened to be running around and checking on damage so that they could schedule repairs and within 30 mins were at our house. What we both thought might have been damage from the ground… turned out to just be storm debris that had landed on our roof from who knows where. Thankfully everything on our own roof is structurally sound, and I was really impressed at how fast they responded. Tells me we picked the right company because the first roof we put on well over a decade ago… that company was pure hell to get in touch with. Yesterday was a wild day… and we are supposed to be having major storms all day today… but thus far no talk of Tornadoes.
I am not certain, but I think this might be the closest a Tornado has ever come to our house. The weird thing about it is that I expected that we would have been able to hear it. Folks always talk about it sounding like a train when it comes close… and while the wind was ferocious… it wasn’t any more so than I have heard before. We had some wild wind a few weeks earlier and in truth I had planned on having the roofers out to check our roof prior to the Tornado yesterday. There is some footage on Facebook of the tornado after it hit the Whirlpool plant, and that it essentially peeled back the roof entirely allowing rain to just come cascading in. The weird part about these videos however is how calm the workers seemed to be. This is all just part of the fact that this all hit without any real prior warning. The sirens blew… after the worst had essentially already hit. Do I think any of the delay was caused by the recent position cuts at NOAA… who knows… but I am certain it did not help.
Yesterday was sort of like I was walking through a dream and not really accessing everything that was happening. Life continued more or less like normal, and it seemed like maybe it shouldn’t have. That said I am pretty regularly sleepwalking through life as I just go through the motions. This morning I was filling my wife’s water bottle… got distracted and did a few other things… and then turned around and I had apparently already filled it in my whirlwind of activity. Thing is… I have no memory of having filled it. I feel like I push so much of my life to the territory of muscle memory, so I can devote my mental resources to thinking about other things… which only serves to create these weird moments where I legitimately have no memory of what just occurred. Fuck the last five years have been more or less one giant memory hole since the shift to remote work, because the sign posts that used to mark the passage of time… are just not quite as stark and clear as they once were.
Anyways. This is the sort of post that I am not going to advertise anywhere. I am fine. Our house and family are fine. Wife got to work just fine, and probably passed within less than a mile of the Tornado… which is its own brand of extremely frightening. It reminds me of the time I was driving home from work and watched a Tornado cross the highway five miles or so in front of me… and all of us drivers just kept going like nothing was happening. We don’t always react to stressers in rational ways.
On the not remembering things thing… to some extent it’s a function of age but not in the sense of failing faculties, just that the brain stops recording actions we take when we’ve done them many, many times before and the older we get, the more things we do fall into that category. I quite literally cannot remember if I’ve switched the water heating off now, even if Mrs Bhagpuss asks me ten seconds after I’ve done it. And she’s no better. We had to make a little reminder, a box with a person inside, waving a sign saying “Switch the bloody water off!” We put it by the kettle when we switch the water heater on and put it back on the windowledge when we switch it off. And even then we forget!
That is scary. Glad to hear you’re all right.