Ah. It’s good to be home. It was a hard day. My boss just relocated to our new home office in another state. We have been scrambling for days to separate what goes and what stays, cleaning out more than 50 file cabinets as well as setting up new procedures and policies to coordinate the two offices.

I stopped at Starbucks for a frappuccino, so I wasn’t quite hungry yet when I got home. I changed into comfy clothes and sat at the computer to do a little cleanup on my photoblog. Hearing thunder nearby, I went to the patio door to see huge black clouds to the north and to the west. The air felt creepy. Great. Local radar showed an intense storm popping up nearby. I headed to the kitchen and heated up a potato I had baked yesterday. Slathering it with butter, cheese, salt, and pepper, I headed back to my office with the delicious potato in hand. I set it on my computer table and had my behind halfway in the chair when the tornado alarm in the next block shrilled.

I hollered at DH who had not heard it yet in his office in the next room. We didn’t perform our carefully orchestrated ritual this time. This one was unexpected. He flew out of his chair and we nearly collided in the hallway. I ran to the front of the house, grabbed my purse and tote bag, ran to the bedroom and traded my pajama pants for shorts, threw a shirt over my tank top, and jammed my feet into the nearest pair of shoes. Every few seconds I stopped to change TV channels and to tune the radio to see what was happening. Where was the tornado? The media never uttered a word about it.

DH was already outside when I ran out to see what was going on. Because there are so many trees around, we practically have to get in the street to see the sky. There was no rain, no wind, just very black clouds a few miles away. Was that thunder or a tornado bearing down on us? Who could tell? My neighbors were all outside trying to figure things out as well. A flash of lightening beyond my rooftop convinced me I had seen enough. Just as we got back inside, the alarm began to wind itself down. What an eerie sound.

Okay then. That’s done. I returned to my computer table and—alas—no potato. I looked around the room wondering where I had stashed it during that frenzied 5 minutes.

“I don’t know where I threw my potato!”

DH laughed at me.

I finally found it on the kitchen counter. I didn’t remember having made it that far when the alarm kick-started me into high gear. This is a wild spring. My county was just today declared a disaster area from the last storm. Sigh. Guess what. Give up? It’s thundering again.

The 9:00 news finally showed a video of what caused the problem. Thank God I didn’t see that! It was a funnel cloud about 3 miles from my house. Shivers!