This is where I spent part of yesterday evening:



(I'm OK and my house is OK. But you probably guessed that. We didn't get a tornado)

Yes, that is my bathtub. I don't have a basement or a "storm shelter," so this is the next-best thing (though in a really deadly tornado, it probably wouldn't afford much protection. Then again, it is at the exact center of my house and is surrounded by several walls on all sides)

They tell you to get under a mattress in the bathtub if a tornado is threatening, but I can't lift any of my mattresses, so I wound up dragging all the bed pillows in there and a couple of quilts (luckily I had had the foresight to dry out the tub after my shower that afternoon) .

At first it looked like we were going to miss all of that, then a storm came through - they blew the sirens so I figured I should at least sit in the bathroom. Then they started talking on the local news - which I had on and turned up (we never lost power) about the severity of the storms, I wound up sitting in the bathtub, mostly covered with the pillows, with another one to stick over my head if I heard that typical "freight train" sound everyone says they hear.

I didn't hear it. I did hear the sirens (even with the bathroom door closed). And heavy rain, and what was probably hail (though if it was, by the time I deemed it safe to peek outside, it had melted).

The storm hit around 7:15 pm, by 8:30 or so it was gone. There was another small wave that came through after 9 but it seemed less likely to be severe. I let myself sleep in this morning - I don't have any exams to give, this day is going to be a research day - and I was kind of keyed up after the storm (and also my weather-alert radio kept going off).

Tornadoes are an old, old fear of mine. I grew up in Ohio, which, while it has fewer tornadoes than Oklahoma, still has tornadoes. And I'm just old enough to remember the 1974 outbreak in Xenia, which, while it wasn't close to me (Xenia is, IIRC, closer to Cincinnati than it is to Cleveland), still, was scary from the standpoint of number of people killed.

(An aside: it's fairly amazing when I think about it, how much weather forecasting and things like storm prediction have improved just in my lifetime - going from old, black-and-white blips on a radar that look like it's WWII vintage, to the new "Doppler" radar. And in some localities, they can tell the specific towns or even intersections of roads in the path of the worst of the storms. I would be willing to bet tornado deaths have declined sharply in the past 40-50 years).

I remember as a kid, my parents calling to me and my brother (usually it was summer late afternoons or evenings) and grabbing the cat and we'd all go down into the basement as the sirens went off. (If I had a moment, I would always grab my stuffed Snoopy. And if there wasn't time, I'd be quite upset the whole time). At that time, I think really my biggest fear was "losing all our stuff" (hence my distress over the stuffed Snoopy). I don't think I quite processed until I was a bit older that "tornadoes can kill you." Which is my fear now, especially after having driven past Moore in May of 1999 as I was on my way here to look for apartments. (My mother was with me at the time. After seeing the damage to the second stories, and the fact that ground floors were mostly intact, she informed me: "You're renting a ground floor apartment." Even though I was 30 at the time. (I was already planning on doing so anyway.))

Anyway. Tornadoes are still something that scare me.

And I will admit, last night, I did a lot of preparation - I had my purse in there, figuring that if the not-quite-worst happened and I lost my house, having my drivers' license and credit cards and what cash I had on hand would make things easier. And I had shoes and more-sturdy clothes (I had changed into pajamas after the shower). And I had my knitting bag, and was able to knit at least up until the time I figured it was safest to sit in the bathtub. And I will admit, perhaps a bit in memory of those old childhood days, I grabbed a couple of my favorite amigurumi (Rupert the baby deer, Boris the whale, the three Rebecca Danger monsters) and had them in the bathroom with me. Just in case. Because just as the practicality of having my purse would make life easier if the not-quite-worst happened, having a couple of familiar objects would make life easier, psychologically speaking, in that situation.

Thank God, though, none of those things needed to be put into practice. The bad storm ended, as I said, somewhere around 8:30 or so, and the follow-up storms were not severe. (They still had thunder and lightning, so I did not get to sleep as early as I had hoped.)

Apparently there was a "tornado aloft" near Kingston, which is a bit over 20 miles from me. And they were saying last night that the Sundowner Arena (a rodeo facility near Coleman) was destroyed - I've driven past there on my way up to Ada.

I guess there were no serious injuries or deaths in my area, which is a good thing. But I think, by and large, Oklahomans know to respect the danger of tornadoes.