Stormy Friday

Friday afternoon: TS Fay packed a punch on this area. At two a.m. last night, the dog began to go ballistic even though the heart of the storm was no farther north than Jacksonville. Liberto heard noises and found him trying to squeeze behind the narrow space between the big screen and the wall. He was all tangled up in the cords and speakers. After Liberto pulled him out, Pete was clip clopping frantically back and forth across the hall, into the bedroom, back into the hall, into the bedroom. . . then the electricity went down. Off went the air conditioner, ceiling fans, lights. The wind was howling outside. I wouldn't have noticed, since I sleep like a baby, except that Paul began to feel spooked by the darkness and moaning wind, and decided to sleep on the floor of our bedroom. Liberto has trouble sleeping anyway, even on a good night, so he never got back to sleep after Petie's antics, and was tossing restlessly. By then, I woke up long enough to learn what was going on. Liberto had set up two candles in the bathroom for light. I fell back asleep until Liberto told me it was 5:45.

I wondered if school would be canceled today, but I had no way of knowing without electricity, so I decided I'd better assume the school was open until I learned otherwise. No electricity for coffee, so I made a cup of tea with the hottest water I could draw from the tap. After dressing in the dark by candlelight and foregoing much hair styling due to lack of a blow dryer, I was ready to leave. And then the electricity burst on, with all the sounds and hums of machinery returning to life. The local news did not indicate any school closings, so I left for work. Soon after I got inside the school building, the heavens opened up and torrents of rain splashed down, blowing sideways, flowing through the parking lot. Some students arrived drenched. In the faculty lounge, I found a tiny frog---as you know, frogs are my thing, just as fish are. I caught it to take it outside, but it escaped from my grasp and hopped behind the copy machine. I didn't recapture it, but later, another teacher was telling others how she had caught a frog in the faculty lounge and freed it outside. Several times today, it poured wildly and the wind blew like crazy. In my classroom, I have wonderful floor to ceiling glass doors, through which the weather can be viewed, and the students would ooh and ahh over the madly pouring rain.
When the intercom announced at 1;00 that we were under a tornado watch, I figured it was just a prelude to a practice tornado drill. This morning's email had instructed teachers to review the tornado procedure, just as we were told last week to review lockdown procedures, and later a lockdown happened. At 2;30, the intercom announced a tornado warning. During warnings, teachers are supposed to make students crouch against the walls away from windows. Thus, my students had to stop making their Shakespeare-Hallmark greeting cards with Shakespearean quotations adorning them and crouch against the wall. I think it was a real warning, not just a practice run, for it lasted about 20 minutes.

At 3:00 the last bell rang. By the time I did attendance, sorted the papers, and swept the afternoon fun off the floor, it was 3:45, and rain was cascading down again. I didn't have my umbrella. But I charged out towards the car because getting wet at the end of the day was no problem; I was on my way home to begin the weekend! It poured all the way home. As I approached our driveway, I noticed that one of the next door neighbor's trees was lying on its side, having just barely missed their car. When I pulled into the driveway, the automatic garage door would only go up about three feet and then stop. Then it would go down again. I tried several times with the same result. Drat! I had to park in the driveway and get sopped again running for the front door. After I got in and changed into something dry and comfortable, Paul and I watched one of our recorded episodes of Cold Case. It's still wet and miserable outside, and WSAV is sending non-stop streamers across the t.v. screen reminding us that all the counties from A to Z are under a tornado watch right now.