Despite the fact that Kelli and I watched “Twister” more times than I can count when we lived together and that I can recite the whole movie (as evidenced by my subject), I am not a fan of storms. Tonight that is a rather inconvient fact. The weather is horrible. It has been raining all day and on my way home from dinner tonight it started to get pretty hard to see through the rain to drive. I was trying to remain cool even after it got worse when I got home. Then Kelli called and wanted to know why I wasn’t watching the storm news on tv because tornados could form with no warning. After asking her what good it would do me to watch the news if they could give me more warning I got off the phone and Patrick and I looked up weather on the computer. We were indeed in the red, just as Kelli had said. I got nervous. I asked Patrick if he thought I’d be crazy to move Brenden into our room. He did, but I did it anyway. If you’ve not seen our house, Brenden’s room has one whole wall that is all window. Not what I want my baby in front of in a storm.

I think my fear stems from going through a tornado in Paris when I was really little. It didn’t hit our house, but a house down at the end of our road was distroyed. Our living room had a bunch of windows in it and I just remember everything being this eerie green color. I’ve been scared of storms ever since. I’m trying not to pass that fear down to Brenden, but I don’t know if I will be successful or not.

When I was little, every night before I went to bed I tried to think of where all my valued possessions were in case there was a fire in the middle of the night. I’d try to think how quickly I could grab my barbies, my favorite stuffed animals and my picture book and get out of the house. I was sort of doing the same thing tonight during the worst of the storm. Where are my bankcards, checkbook, child, animals and damn I wish I had a flash drive with all my digital pictures on it so that I could just grab that and go. I know it’s not rational. And usually I’m not that much of an alarmist, but I don’t like storms. You know those stupid surveys that people forward around that always ask, “storms-scary or cool?” Definitely not cool!