Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Where's Jim Cantori When I Need Him?!

An alarm wakes me at some unnaturally early time this morning  - well before I'm ready.  I notice a little mechanical voice is blathering on to  me about a possible tornado situation - well that's just going to have to wait, I need my beauty sleep.  I whack the alarm a few times, until it admits defeat, and go back to bed.

When I rise up at a more reasonable hour of the morning, I do naturally turn on the weather as soon as I've found my coffee.

In the South, we are addicted to weather information. The reason being that sometimes the weather is completely different from what was forecast the day before or 4 hours before. Heck, give us 20 minutes and it might change. We never know! Therefore, we religiously troll any channel showing any teeny tiny bit of meteorological information.  Jim Cantori is a god to us.

"Well goodness, it's gonna fuss up a bit today", says the weatherman with a rather intense look on his face. Right quick as a matter of fact. I look out the window into the dark and wonder if I should put away the hot rollers and just go with a John Deere cap. Really, even Aqua Net can't hold up under a storm.

I get myself dressed and drag out the big pocketbook so as to hide as many things as possible from the rain. (Who am I kidding, I always have a giant pocketbook.) I head out the door towards the car and sure as heck the minute I lock the front door of the house behind me, the rain pours out of the sky and down onto me like a giant waterfall. In the 14 seconds I take to get into my car, giant pocketbook hindering my swift climb into the front seat, I am looking like a swamp rat that's been swimming for shore all day.

I knew I should've gone with the Deere cap!

I start driving to work only to realize that it's a pretty fierce storm out there and I can barely see the road. That makes it fun and lively, what with the 18 wheeler riding my back end like I'm the Pied Piper getting him out of town. Don't follow me Sir, I'm probably driving into a Quick Mart wall in a minute.

I get myself settled on the road, or what I believe is the road,  and just as I'm passing Piggly Wiggly I hear a weird dying cat type noise. Being a female terrified of car trouble - for this is when nails get broken and you can't find a leftover bag of chips anywhere in the back seat -    I immediately assume it's my car and I'm going to be stranded on the road with no John Deere cap and kitten heel slipons. This is not good.

I roll down the window just a touch and realize it's not my car, it's a tornado siren. Oh goodie, my day gets just a little brighter. A booming voice (what is with all these electronic voices these days  - surely Len down the road needs a job)  is trying to be heard at the same time as the siren is going off. It's telling me this is a tornado warning and that I need to get into an interior room or low lying place.

Well, last I checked, my car had no interior room. It was a squat little thing though. But I know the rules, they are burned into you at birth in the South. I am supposed to get out of my car in this mess and either go run into the middle of a Wal-Mart or go lay in a ditch. Well, I realize there's as many Wal-Marts in the South as there are Waffle Houses, but apparently I'm on the one road without either. Not that I would go hide in a Waffle House - what are they, shoe boxes with windows?

So my only choice here appears to be a ditch. In the rain. With my kitten heel shoes. And no cap. Heaven only knows what's crawling around in that ditch. Oh dear.

I look at the sky. I listen to the sirens. I look at the ditch. I look at my shoes.

I keep driving.