June 29, 1998 - Storm warning

Monday, June 29, 1998

Willa 6/29/98

I'm getting really tired of being woken up early in the morning by thunderstorms. A couple of mornings last week, the thunder was so loud that it actually shook the house. This morning it was hail. It sounded like someone was throwing gravel at the windows. I would just start to go back to sleep and it would start up again. And today was so incredibly humid. I thought we were going to have another thunderstorm around noon, but it just rained a little and then stopped. My mom just called and said that somewhere a little bit west and north of here they're having grapefruit-sized hail, and we're under a severe thunderstorm warning.

I know I always talk about how weird the weather is, but it is.

Yes, it is. We're down in the basement now. The sirens started going off about fifteen minutes ago and we took cover, bringing a flashlight, a radio, a cordless phone, my purse, my portable television, my computer, the digital camera and the back-up tapes for the business computer. Oh, and Pyewacket. She's exploring now. We apparently got some water in the basement this morning. Well, not apparently--there is water down here, but we don't know when it came in. There's a puddle in the middle of the floor and Pyewacket keeps walking through it and leaving little wet catprints across the floor.

Bob went back upstairs a few minutes ago to get fresh batteries for the radio and didn't come back for quite awhile. When he got back down here and I asked him where he'd been, he said he'd been outside looking for storms.

We went outdoors for a few minutes before we came down here, and our next door neighbor was out moving her car into the garage in case we got hail. Bob was holding Pye, who was looking around curiously, perfectly calm, and our neighbor said, "My cats are freaking out."

This is a picture of Pyewacket that I took just a few minutes ago, sitting on the bed in the basement. Looks nervous, doesn't she? She's been all over the place, been up and down the stairs, underneath everything that has a space under it and on top of everything that she could reach. I said to Bob, "I guess we can't count on her to be our early warning system, can we?"

After she finished inspecting everything she got back up on the bed, curled up and took a bath.

Later . . .

We're back upstairs now. I'm not sure whether the tornado/severe thunderstorm warning is over or not, but the sirens have stopped sounding and Bob decided we should come back up. I heard on the television that the roof was torn off a fire station in a nearby town and that there was a tornado on the ground, but I haven't heard of any other damage.

Since it looked like we were going to have a big storm earlier in the day, I decided not to go out and look for the Fresh Produce store. I spent the morning workin on Javascript and the afternoon playing in Bryce, then went out to the post office and grocery store. Oh, and Best Buy. I bought Bryce. I've been having so much fun with it, but since I only have a demo version I can't save anything. I've been trying to get around that by capturing the screen images in Paint Shop Pro, but it's too hard. You can't see the actual image until it "renders," or paints the screen, and when it's finished rendering, it's covered with the software company's logo. So I've been trying to catch it right at the point when it's almost finished rendering, but before the logo appears. I finally decided to just go buy the thing and stop worrying about it.

In the mail today I got the fonts I ordered from S.S. Studio that go with the spaceship graphics. This one is called Satellite, and has cartoony images of space ships, televisions, cocktail glasses, coffee pots, lots of 50's and 60's kitschy things. I think it's pretty cute. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it, although I did make a few little divider graphics, like the star ones above, and this one:

I especially like the little television sets.