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].

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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.

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