I had different plans for today’s post, but I’m currently sitting on the floor in the bathroom at work because it’s a designated tornado shelter (and the one I trust to be a bit safer than other nearby options). The tornado warning sirens have been silent for ten minutes now, but the weather report says they’ll last another forty-five minutes and there’s a good chance we’ll get a new set before these expire, given the way the storm front is moving (I turned out to be correct: we got a new warning that lasted an additional thirty minutes). Currently, the door is open as what seems like the only other employee in this part of the building is hanging out in the other bathroom doorway, the both of us scanning various radars and weather monitoring services while we talk about the likelihood of us getting hit by any of the potential tornados. Currently, the wind makes it look like they’ll all pass west and north of us, but the storm front took a pretty hefty push to the east, directly toward us, right as the sirens hit, so who knows. Know that, if you’re reading an entire post with the normal (low) number of spelling and grammar issues that I’ve survived and everything turned out some kind of fine [it did. No tornadoes even touched-down in my area. There were some hurricane-force winds, though, and I spent 24 hours without power after writing this post and eventually leaving for home between bursts of the storm].

It’s quite a thing, to be stuck at work because of a tornado warning. I planned to work for about fifteen or thirty minutes past seven, which is pretty normal for me these days, but then the sirens went off and I’ve resigned myself to being here until it’s officially safe to go out. I mean, I’m an Unconcerned Midwesterner who would absolutely be standing on their deck patio in the pouring rain to see if I could spot a funnel or some ominous swirling in the clouds overhead if I was at home, but I’m also much more confident in my ability to survive a tornado at home than at work where there’s some genuinely dangerous stuff scattered about that could easily put the validity of a “tornado shelter” to the test. Not that I’m terribly worried about dying. My enduring Special Interest as a child was weather and, since I grew up in the Midwest, I was fascinated with thunderstorms, powerful winds, and tornadoes, to the degree that I spent much of my childhood wanting to become a storm chaser. Thanks to that background knowledge and my choice to mostly keep up with weather science, it was pretty easy to tell that the conditions weren’t correct for a tornado to form near us. If anything, it was going to form to the west and pass north of us, following the prevailing winds, but even that would be unlikely since the primary place all of the wind currents were mixing consistently to create a tornado was half a state away, along a different storm front. There’s still the chance of hail, lightning strikes, and wind powerful enough to cause the doors to the outside to rattle in their frames, so it’s not entirely safe, but I’m more worried about my car sustaining enough damage that I can’t leave my workplace [which didn’t happen] than about me, personally, taking any damage.

There’s not much of an upside to all this other than getting paid to write a blog post while taking shelter from a tornado (and do at least a little bit of work since the current weather and my desire to observe it makes it difficult to focus on any single thing, so I’m bouncing between this blog post, formatting a spreadsheet to track some information for a project I’m working on, poking my head into the stairwell with the external door not that far from me, and cycling between my various radar programs. I did go put my phone back on my desk, too, so I could charge it while I’ve got my laptop here, since I’m concerned about losing power and don’t want to drain the battery so much that I won’t have a working cell phone at home [a decision that bordered on prescient since I didn’t have power when I got home and wouldn’t have it for about 24 hours]. It’s just sort of boring being here. I can’t watch the rain fall, I can’t look for flashes of lightning, I can’t watch the trees sway in the wind, and I can’t exult in the power of nature striking back against all we puny mortals who think that the world will end when our time on it ends (after all, climate change will only kill us and a whole lot of species that live on the planet while the planet itself will live on and on). All I can do is sit in this cool, square, and cloyingly scented bathroom while I wait for the end of all these tornado warnings.

During the hour and a half that I was hovering around the tornado shelter I’d chosen, the power blinked out twice. Once was a more typical stutter of power, where some things went offline but most did not because the power came back quickly enough that they didn’t power down. A classic “brownout” situation. A couple minutes later, the power went off, stayed off long enough for me to wonder if it wasn’t coming back, and then returned quickly enough that I didn’t have time to form a thought in response to my own question. We’ve been having more and more of those, lately. That was our fifth or sixth power loss so far this year [at least two more of these have happened in the week since I wrote this] and while I’m sure it’s fine, the knowledge that my state hasn’t really funded infrastructure properly in a long time doesn’t fill me with much confidence. Nor does knowing that the power company with a local monopoly (or whatever its called when service providers agree to not enter each others’ areas) has been ramping up prices without doing any sort of reinvesting in infrastructure to justify it. All we got is a letter that said “we’re raising prices because, well, shucks, golly gee, we gotta” which said absolutely nothing and read like total bullshit. Still, I’m going to leave the building now, between storm surges, because I need to get gas. Hopefully I can get home alright and won’t find any horrible damage [I didn’t] before I can safely tuck my car away in my underground garage [which I could not because the power was out. If I’d gone home earlier, risked the tornado warnings, I’d have made it inside since I apparently arrived home fifteen minute after the power went out] for however long it winds up being there. I could wind up stuck at home with no power due to a power outage or a tree falling in a really inconvenient place. At least I’ll get to enjoy a bit of the storm on my way home.