Stormy Weather

A couple of months ago, in anticipation of the severe weather season, I purchased a small hand-held weather radio. Like all things electronic, it requires reading a small manual written by a professional engineer prior to using it.

While this manual is much easier to read than the coffee-table sized book that came with my TiVo, I still couldn’t figure out how to program the radio so that the only weather alerts I would receive would be for the actual county where I reside, not the entire south central Kansas region.

I blame this on the fact that it was late and the print was tiny, not on the engineer who wrote the manual.

After fiddling around with the different settings, I finally figured out that “FR” on the screen meant Friday, not French. I went to sleep, secure in the knowledge that I would be appropriately alerted in my native language should a weather emergency arise.

And one did. I was awakened several times by the shrill buzz of the early warning alert system as a thunderstorm moved through several different counties adjacent to mine. While I have an odd fascination with severe weather, which is mostly a fascination with how not to be harmed by it, around midnight I also have a fascination with sleep. Which was being disturbed by my deceivingly small, yet loud, radio.

All the weather alert system has to do to get my attention is say either ‘golf ball-sized hail’ or ‘tornado warning’ and I go into ultra-readiness mode. My adrenalin kicks in as though I’ve just consumed a couple of Red Bull energy drinks. A few years ago, prior to moving to the suburbs, ultra-readiness mode meant driving to the nearest parking garage to protect my Blazer from hail damage. (The boat took up all the space in the garage. Now I have a bigger garage where both the boat and the Blazer safely reside).

I’ve seen how hail can reduce an awning into tattered strips of cloth, or make a car look like it’s been used for target practice. In 1991 I was in Andover about ¼ mile west of the tornado that struck. I was never in harm’s way, but I will always remember the black wall of destruction that reduced homes to piles of broken lumber and mud, sometimes leaving only a bathtub intact.

But last night there was no tornado in my area, just a powerful thunderstorm that moved into my neighborhood around 1:45 am. It wasn’t destructive, just windy and wet. As much water as it dumped I thought I might even be off the hook for mowing today.

I could have, I should have. But instead of mowing I found other things to do. Meanwhile, the weather radio is buzzing again. Severe thunderstorms in Sumner County. Sigh. I really need to get that thing figured out.