On Stalking This Weeks Storms from Across the Country

When we first moved to Florida I was shocked by the daily torrent of rain that descended on the apartment.  It could start raining, and five minutes later when we would rush out to the car I would be sloshing through inches of water that came up over my high heels to my ankle (this was back in the day when I still had a pair of sensible medium height high heels that I loved to wear, before I wore them into the ground and went back to mostly flats after failing to find an equally comfortable and cute replacement).

Every single day I would look outside at some point and be pretty sure that a hurricane at struck, or at least a tropical storm, because rain wasn't supposed to act like that, coming down in solid sheets so that within minutes fire hose like geysers of water were exploding out of gutters.

I shook my head as we drove by bright yellow signs that said: Mandatory Drought Restrictions.  The first seven or so years of my life in California were non-stop drought, with pathetic looking lakes that looked like rivers, down hundreds of feet from their edges.  I doubted that anything that South West Florida could throw at me could resemble a typical California here-we-go-again drought.

Then along came the dry season and the rain actually stopped falling from the sky.  For those of you who like the whole, 80 degrees in December climate it was "nice."  And I found myself grumbling slightly less (although I'll admit that wasn't because the rain stopped.  It was because the rain and the high dew point and the 1000% humidity with the 95 degree temperatures stopped).

This week, I've been freezing in California (I haven't yet convinced my body that 60-degree mornings are warm) and watching the weather news in Florida like a hawk.  Okay, what I've really been obsessing over is Calah's blog, which gives me an almost daily update of what things are like in the area, and had me running around the house showing everyone the funnel cloud that is basically above our apartment, after she posted it.

Calah's post actually showed that I hadn't been watching the news as carefully as I thought I had, because when I read her post and said:  "This says 12 tornados have touched down!!!" and Paul and Dad looked at me like I was crazy because apparently it had been on the news and I had been so busy looking at the pictures on the screen while dividing my attention between that and something I had been reading, that I hadn't realized that it wasn't just regular palm tree damage from a tropical storm.

And now I watch and read with a rather guilty feeling, because, when we rushed out of the house, with someone hurrying me along and talking about how slow I was being all morning (while I tried to remember everything I had forgotten) I forgot to take down my two planters on the balcony and put them on the ground (which I'd forgotten through the dry-not-all-that-windy season not to secure with bungie cords like everyone else...) and I left two semi-inflated little kiddie pools out there, which I'd meant to bring inside and clean up, and I'm pretty sure that after this storm they are no longer on our balcony and there is a good chance that they, have now been swept away and plummeted to the ground two stories below, hopefully not harming anyone in the process because I was such a forgetful idiot when I was trying to make sure I'd done absolutely everything for everyone before we walked out the door.  <-- How's that for a run on sentence... yeah... that's what it's like in my head every time I think about the planters out there plummeting off the second story balcony railing.


Now to go back to the cold.  I wonder if my body will adjust to the "cold" just in time to head back to balmy South West Florida...  I think that might be how it works!