After 14 years of living in Kansas (minus a 2 year stint in Virginia) I have never seen a tornado. Most every spring the sirens blare and everyone frantically looks around trying to judge their personal level of danger, trying to decide when is the right moment to hit the basement.
Tonight we were having dinner at Cece's pizza when the sirens started whistling. I joked at all the morons that ran outside to look at the sky until those said morons started pointing and were all staring in the same direction. Then I became one of those morons.
I went outside and asked what we were looking at and someone pointed out a very obvious tornado attempting to form freakishly close to where we were. I went back inside and asked the workers if they had any plan if the tornado should touch the ground. They directed me to the man in charge who turned out to be just as clueless, but wore a blue shirt which meant he was the Dalai Lama of Cece's Pizza. I asked him the same question. What is the tornado plan because every business should have a plan since we live in freaking tornado alley. His response reminded me of another fast food chain worker which will cause me to go off topic for a minute because I'm not sure if I shared this story:
One night we were having KFC for dinner. My brother in law asked if they used peanut oil to fry their fried chicken because of Talan's allergies and all. The worker gave him a look like he was an idiot and said, "We don't use oil to fry our chicken." They must use skittles and rainbows in the KFC kitchen to make chicken that very much resembles the chicken the rest of americans fry in various types of oil and call fried chicken. Amazing!!
So, the manager of Cece's response to my concern of the safety of myself, the 6 people I was responsible for and the other 50 people chowing down on the greasy goodness was:
"Ummm. I guess we go under the tables?"
Really?? Because a spinning vortex carrying wind speeds of well over 100 miles an hour is not going to stand a chance against a table that nearly falls over when I bump into it. Good plan!
It was hailing nickel size hail quite badly, but I spotted a mountain man who looked like he could be a creeper, but also looked like he had the wisdom in this particular moment. I asked him for his opinion of what to do in this situation. He came up with a better plan to either move to the back of Cece's or head to Target which seemed much more sturdy, but he also thought the storm might be past us even though that funnel cloud was trying so hard still to form and was still way too close for comfort.
After weighing our options for a while we had a break in hail and we rounded up all the kids and ran to the car as fast as we could despite the well known rule 'never drive in a tornado'. My 15 year old nephew held Talan on his lap and put his arm over Syphr who was also not buckled in. (This was a get out of here now moment, not a safety moment). We only live about a mile away, but while driving I happened to look left and saw a very beautiful, but very terrifying tornado which was so close it made my foot hit the gas pedal to the floor. At that point I wasn't sure which way it was headed. We got home and all the kids ran to the safety of the basement.
I walked back outside to see what was happening as we saw a few people viewing the tornado goodness on the way home only to view all of its spectacularness from the safe side of it. After confirming that we were safe, all the kids came outside for this once in a rare occurrence view. I was so excited for Ashton to see it since he loves anything weather related. We watched for a while, then saw the clouds behind that tornado dip up and down repeatedly until it decided to stay down in another tornado. So cool to see it actually form.
This is a picture someone else took, but this is the tornado that we saw forming at Cece's, and on the way home:
This is the second tornado we watched form from the comfort of behind it.
After it all, we are all safe, even Chappie who managed to escape any hail damage. That said, there is still 14 minutes left in the day, the world still might end.
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