The wind is blowing really hard here. Every time it does, the house sort of makes this swishing sound as it buckles and sways. And all I can think is "this house would so not survive a tornado."
Because we all know about my irrational freak outs due to my childhood trauma completely logical fear of tornados.
Luckily, this is not my house. My house has a special concrete tornado safety room in the basement. That's why we bought it over the other house. So that I would have someplace other than the bathtub to cower in with my laptop while intensely monitoring The Weather Channel anytime the sky looks slightly dark.
Sure, it smells kind of musty and I have to read by flashlight. But you need a flashlight anyway in your tornado shelter, along with a battery powered radio, spare emergency cellphone, a shovel and your autographed copy of Hanson's MMM-Bop CD. And yeah, I have to share my tornado safety room with our Christmas decorations because Jeff insists on referring to it as a "storage closet" but that's not a huge deal because it's not like I keep the Christmas decorations there most of the time anyhow. I mean, from October through April they're on the tree.
Maybe you look at other people's houses and make mental notes about their choice of decor. I look at other people's houses and judge whether or not I will be likely to die there.
This is why I like to be friends with people of the Morman faith. Because one time I went to my friend Jessie's house and that's when I discovered that they keep a year's worth of essentials stored in their basement in case of an emergency. It very nearly converted me.
(Actually at the time it was like, 1999 and I was all "Jessie, is your family afraid of Y2K or something?" and she was all "No, we're Morman" and then I was all "What's a Morman?" because I was really, really, really very sheltered)
