Fighting Phantasmal Guilt As I Wait For My Turn In The Climate Disaster Zone

Most of the time, I feel pretty happy living in the Midwest. I may not seem like the sort, especially if you’ve been reading my blog over the last two rather miserable years of my life, but I really try to count my blessings, so to speak, and appreciate what I’ve got when I can. This week (last week, as you’re reading this), I’m feeling more grateful than ever to be living in the Midwest. While we’re not entirely immune to climate change and related disasters, we’re fairly insulated from them. I mean, tornado season is growing longer, strange weather patters are becoming more common, the weather bounces from one extreme to the other as polar winds fight unseasonably warm weather from the south, and all the while local infrastructure struggles to keep up with the varying demands places on it. We’re FAR from immune, especially as droughts worsen and wildfires become more common (I fully expect to see a fire tornado sometime in my life thanks to the confluence of living in tornado and prairie fire territory), but it will (probably) be a few years yet before any of the city-destroying mass disasters show up for my part of southern Wisconsin. So, from the comfort of my workplace and home, I’m watched with mounting horror as LA has burned. I still avoid the news most of the time and I’m not one to go look for videos of horrible stuff on the internet, but looking through Bluesky has proved to be a pretty effective window into recent natural disasters, which has me once again questioning the place that social media has in my life. And, you know, thinking about climate change.

Continue reading

Notes From Within A Tornado Shelter

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].

Continue reading

Spring Weather In Winter And Winter Weather In Spring

I spent my most recent Friday (two Fridays ago from when this gets posted) spring-cleaning my apartment. Which feels a little funny to write today, given the blizzard conditions I drove in last night and the multiple inches of slowly-melting slush that still coat the ground today. A lot of which is only just thawing out from last night’s freeze. We’re solidly in April now and still getting wintery weather, despite much of our actual winter being much closer to what I’d expect of spring around this point in the year. It’s not unheard of for us to get a few late snows (as late as May, sometimes) as spring temperatures fluctuate, but we rarely get snow after we’ve had a day that has broke past seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday, two days of rain turned into about thirty-six hours of snow and while it only just barely froze while it was falling yesterday, that little bit of ice and tons of slush turned my evening commute from its comfortable fifteen minutes into an hour-long affair. It was horrendous and coming home to a still-clean apartment was only mildly comforting. After all, I had to turn my heat up again and figure out what I was going to do the next day if the roads proved too treacherous to risk (as it turns out, the roads were fine, but getting to them was nearly impossible because my landlord never plowed my parking lot and being in an underground parking garage means contending with a slippery, uphill drive that proved impossible on mornings like today’s). Which wasn’t a huge issue, but it’s still incredibly off-putting to have spent a solid ten hours with my windows open as I cleaned my apartment more thoroughly than I have since before I moved into it and then, just over three days later, see snow blowing in my still-open bedroom window.

Continue reading