Pent up freaking out.

WE HAVE INTERNET!!!


I am utterly thrilled.

There was a while there where I was sure that I was never going to be in touch with the world again. It does, however, royally tick me off that we went from paying 20 bucks a month to almost double that because of this backwoods part of the world we're in, but whatever.

Last night I made chicken enchiladas, and they turned out pretty good, but I was so freaked out that I wasn't paying close enough attention and I burned the cheese. Last night it stormed so badly, and there were sirens going off, and Andrew said they were some kind of emergency vehicle, not the tornado sirens, but I was still shaking the whole time.

Let me explain this for you. A few years ago, it must be close to four now because I was still in high school, Mom and I were sitting at home, doing nothing during monsoon season and it was storming, of course. I think it was 06, actually, the same year the Rillito flooded and the Mammoth bridge was washed over, so I had just graduated. Andrew was still living with his parents, we hadn't moved out, and I was in that strange in between time when you've graduated, but it still feels like summer... I was sitting on the couch reading, Mom was in the bedroom with the dog, Diddles (our cat) was asleep in my room, and the wind was picking up a little. I got this feeling that I wanted to go sit in my bedroom and read with the cat instead, so I picked myself up and went and not even 5 minutes later, we heard this crashing sound coming from the living room. I remember Mom yelling something along the lines of, "What the hell?" It ended in some expletive, I know, could have been worse or better, I'm not sure. We rushed out into the kitchen and just as we came out, we felt the front of the trailer lift up off the bricks, right up and come crashing back down and on the other side of the counter, we could see the window that I had literally just been sitting next to completely busted out. The half-plexiglass window, by the way. There were sirens and honking and yelling going on outside and Mom decided that we had to fix the window because the rain was just gushing into the house. There was a shard of glass in the opposite part of the counter that served a little like a wall and it was embedded in the wood a good 3 or 4 inches. The crystal lamp that had been sitting in front of the window was thrown neatly into the rocking chair in front of it, not even so much as cracked... and there was a jagged, serving platter sized piece of glass exactly where I had been sitting less than 5 minutes earlier. I can't really convey how terrified I was as my mother went out to the sheds to find some kinds of nails or a hammer or something to board up the window and I stood there, with a chunk of plywood between me and a raging storm, trying to keep the rain out of the house. Eventually, it stopped raining and the wind stopped beating us into oblivion, and I went outside, too...

Trailer in front of us had been shifted from | to \ on it's bricks, the one behind it was completely destroyed and they were taking people away in an ambulance. Other trailers were thrown this way or that on their blocks, windows were broken and walls battered. A TV barely missed out sleeping neighbor's head, the people in the destroyed trailer had been saved by their closet doorframe, and there was destruction everywhere. I was crying, mom was crying, I called my friend David, who lived not even a few blocks away to make sure he was okay... and nothing had happened there. It was just a storm for them, but what hit us was a microburst, practically a mini tornado.

Every time the wind picks up, all I can feel is the floor lifting up from under us again. We asked a couple people, why? Why didn't we get more damage? We felt the house move, there's a hole still in the wood from the glass and there's a crack all across the roof from where the ceiling (which we didn't know at the time) lifted off and set back down. The only thing we could find was our solid, extremely heavy wood porch, the one my dad built by hand and had to have 3 friends help him move. It had held down the front of our trailer. That, and the fact that it just wasn't our time, had kept us from just as much damage as the Lagunas...




Storms make me nervous.


Last night, two funnel clouds touched down and immediately sucked back up on post, so fast there were no sirens. Post is less than a mile away. Even a small tornado would have ripped through us. I told Andrew last night that if there ever was a tornado, I will not hesitate to grab my bird first. Today I heard something wierd, I dunno what kind of siren it was, so I grabbed my bird and ran to the middle room. Then I came back for my phone, my laptop, water from the fridge, and my purse. Like a drill, I guess. Two minutes might be all I have some day, I want to be ready.


And during all of this pent up freaking out last night, I was cooking. I was going to be so angry if the power went out (we have an electric stove) while those enchiladas were in the oven.

Did I mention, we have the internet??