Tornadoes

As I mentioned at the end of the last post, there was a tornado warning here. I didn't leave my apartment. I may have even spent the whole time in my recliner. That got me to thinking about when I was a little kid, and how every time there was a tornado warning, the family would go down to the basement, into the little room on the uphill side--the one that had about a three-foot thick wall against the outside and the main load-bearing wall for the house, which was about a foot thick itself, on the other side--hunker down with the little black-and-white TV (complete with the clicking channel knobs--they're hard to describe if you don't remember them, so here's a picture of a TV with them), and wait for the all-clear.

----If you want to skip a rant about that old TV, go to the next line like this----

Speaking of that TV, at one point my dad made a "remote" for that one. He cut out a notch in the end of a 2x4 so we could change the channel without having to get closer than about 4 feet--which was about the distance between the chairs and the TV in that little room. After that TV broke down, that "remote" became an extra security door stop so people couldn't just break in the front door--which each of my parents did at separate times when they locked themselves out of the house.

----Here resumes the main post----

Going to the basement ended about the time I got to middle school. Then we'd stay upstairs, and wait for it to get relatively close--which it never did.

Then in college, the common reaction to a tornado warning became "Let's go out and see if we can see it!" "And if we can't, we can at least play catch/football/ultimate frisbee/tag/etc. in the rain!"

Then I got "old" and my reaction returned to simply staying where I was and watching out the window.

It's weird. I've written two posts today, and both started out as some sort of safety topic, and went off in strange directions.