Storm Stories

I just came home from my friend/soon to be boss's wedding in St. Paul. Let me tell you, the Embassy Suites hotel in downtown St. Paul is super nice. I loved it. The whole lobby is open up to the seventh floor/roof. It's kind of a 1700s French style. I don't know if that's exactly the right description or not. It was a lot of brick and quaint wrought iron railings. If I wasn't feeling so lazy I would upload the picture here.

The wedding was fun. This is my dance teacher/boss so of course there was a lot of dancing. We didn't say for the whole thing obviously. I am sure they are still down there dancing up a storm! But Ross has to work at 6am so he didn't want to stay late. He didn't have his nap today and he always naps in the afternoon after the market so I'll probably find him sleeping on the couch in about five minutes. I can leave him out there most of the night and he won't wake up until about 3am. Kinda mean, but it's nice to have the bed to myself for once.

I've realized though, that drinking a lot of wine has increased my alcohol tollerance incredibly. I used to have one beer and feel tipsy. Tonight I had 2 beers and some kind of mixed drink with rum and didn't feel a thing. This is probably not a good thing...

Anyway, while I was out in the hall polishing off the second beer, I got talking to my new co-worker, don't know if I can really call her that because I'm taking over her job... Anyway she told me that none other than Joe Mauer was house shopping practically next door to her. Now the thing I forgot to ask her was how long ago this was... I will have to remember to bring it up again so I can find out. He didn't buy the house, which she said is an incredibly nice HUGE house with all the extras. I figure he probably didn't buy it because it was too far out. She lives in between Stillwater and Mahtomedi. I can tell Joe from personal experince how much fun the drive is from there to downtown...NOT!!! Why do you think I was so anxious to move to Minneapolis? I hated living in Stillwater with a passion.

She was disapointed because she had been hoping she would run into him at Cub Foods. You know if he did move out there, it might be reason for me to move back to Stillwater.

(a pause as Lara remebers how long it takes to get ANYWHERE, the terrible drivers, the tourists, the lack of ANYTHING to do, the damn BRIDGE...)

Okay, temporary lapse in judgement. Never moving back to Stillwater. Don't care if Joe Mauer does move there. I'll just visit my parents a lot.

So I titled this blog "Storm Stories" because when we left the wedding, it was storming. Yes, for once it is actually storming in Minneapolis.

Fine, it lightning about a dozen times (9 of those were just in the distance) and it thundered twice. Still, here that constitues a storm. We are part of the cement heat bubble and the storms always go around us or over us. Trust me. We only get nailed about once every four years. Although last Friday night it stormed for 2 straight hours, and I mean really stormed. That was a nice change, and the power didn't even go out!

The power goes out quite a bit here. I've been quite pleased it hasn't gone out since my birthday, when it was so hot that everyone put their airconditioners on and overloaded the system. It's gone out so much since we've lived here that Excel knows where I live without me having to say. I know the computer personally. No, really. When I call, after they tell me that yes, they know where I live and they know there is an outtage, then the computer says "Hi, this is Mary with Excel Energy. Would you like me to call you back when we know when your power will be back on?"

If I sound a bit bummed out about the storm situation, it's because I grew up in what I like to call the "Eau Claire honorary Tornado Alley." See, every time bad storms come here to the Cities, they hit downtown and split up into pieces. But once they get around the Cities, in Wisconsin, they figure out how to re-join up around Menominee, then they hit Eau Claire with everything they've got.

When I lived in Sheboygan (where I was born) I only remember two bad storms. And they weren't even that bad. Just a lot of thunder and lightening. I hated the lightening. I am terrified of fire, and I knew even then that lightening was made of fire so I was scared. My mom didn't help of course, telling me how many house fires lightening started...thanks Mom. The first storm I remember, we were actually under a tornado warning (however one never showed) and it was late at night and I remember my mom getting me out of bed, and we stood in front of the window in the office where we could see the whole valley of Plymouth (very hilly community and we lived on top of a hill) and watched the horrible clouds roll in and prayed. I wasn't scared of that one. A few years later, we were at Crystal Lake Beach in Elkhart Lake, and I was swimming (have pictures from this day, I had pig tails and a goofy navy swimsuit with a red duck on it) and the waves suddenly turned this horrible dark color and got white caps as the wind kicked up. It was the downdraft of the apporaching storm. My mom pulled me out of the lake and we drove home. The storm hit a few minutes after we'd been home, but my mom had to go over to the neighbors house for some reason. So I was home with my dad and at this point he worked long hours in Milwaukee and I never saw him so I was more comfortable with my mom there. He made me spaghetti for dinner and I thought it tasted like crap because it wasn't how my mom made it. I remember sitting at the kitchen counter next to the patio door, eating the nasty dinner, watching the rain come down sideways against the patio door. Even thought it was 5pm it was completely black outside and I'd never seen that before. I was terrified that my mom wasn't coming home ever because the storm would get her. I jumped off my stool and ran to the picture window that overlooked the valley, hoping to see her at the neighbor's house, but I couldn't. As I stood there looking out over the valley and hills beyond, this huge flash of lightening stretched out over the entire valley and it looked just like a skeleton hand.

That did it. That freaked me out. I started screaming hysterically for my mom and buried my face in the living room carpet with all the lights on so I couldn't see the lightening until the storm was over.

A few years later we moved to Eau Claire, aka Tornado Alley. I should mention that in my life, I've been in 10 tornados. 5 of those occured in Eau Claire. 1 was in Woodbury, 1 was in Three Lakes, 1 in Somerset, 1 outside New Richmond (the tornado that destroyed Hugo Memorial Day weekend 08), 1 was in Mahtomedi. All the rest were Eau Claire.

The first experince I had with tornados in Eau Claire was when I was six. It was late May of 1989, and it was the last week of kindergarten. Since I lived in the white trash community of Cleghorn about 3.5 miles south of Eau Claire, my elementary school was a piece of crap with trailers attached to it. Yes, you heard right. My elementary school had trailers attached to it. You wanna talk about white trash!!?? I lived it. My classmates were kids who wore 10 year old hand-me-downs and lived in houses with broken out windows (seriously you'd think these places were abandoned) where pigeons lived on the second floor and rusting cars littered the waist high grass in the yard. They were scary kids, too. Rough. Beat you up for looking at them wrong. The sixth graders looked about 18. Some of them might have been...

Anyway, my dad went out of town, to Texas for work that week. And all week, we were tormented by storms.

I'm telling you, you'd never see anything like this. I don't know what kind of bizzare storm front it was. Every morning the sun would be shining, it would be a beautiful day. I had afternoon kindergarten, so the bus picked me up just before noon every day. And pretty much as soon as the bus rolled up, I could see the dark clouds building on the horizon. By the time I got to school it would be storming. It would storm from just after noon until about 3am.

This happened 4 days in a row!!! We got NO sleep.

Wednesday was the worst day. It was the last day of school and our teacher had cleaned up the classroom and set it up nicely and she didn't want us to mess it up. So we spent the afternoon in the library.

Remember when I said our elementary school had trailers attached to it? Yeah, our library was a trailer. (They called them "Learning Pods" by the way). So it is storming cats and dogs, the wind is practically ripping this trailer off the main building and here sit the kindergartenders inside it. No one bothered to move us. We were terrified. It was nearly black outside (again) and it was hailing... finally we decided it was safer to hide under something (we'd had a lot of tornado drills) so most of us--me included--crawled underneath the card catalouges (remember those??!!!) and spent the rest of the day there.

By the time I got home from school, it had only gotten worse. It lulled a bit over dinner, then came back 10 times stronger. I remember sitting on the couch, watching Garfield, rain beating down the patio door and lightening flashing every damn second, trying to tell myself NOT to look out the window and just concentrate on Garfield. I think by the time my mom pulled me down to the basement, I was literally saying out loud "just watch Garfield, just keep watching Garfield nothing is happening outside."

It was about this time that my dad called from Texas to check in. There were terrible storms in Texas where he was too. I talked to him on the phone and I could hear the hail on the roof of the building he was in. He said that there had been a tornado and several cars were gone and a roof had been torn off a building. When my mom picked up the phone again, she said that the storm was really getting bad here and we were going in the basement now.

So we sat down in our basement (I hate basements too, so it doesn't do me well when storms come and I have to go to a place I'm afraid of) on our old couch and listened to the radio. My mom's best friend called us and said that a tornado had been sited only 2 miles from our house. So then there's that awful feeling when all you can see is black in those tiny basement windows and you have no idea if a tornado is barreling down on you that very second.

It didn't come. After almost an hour we finally went upstairs and I rememember laying awake in my room until 2:30am when finally the storm moved away (I was watching the clock).

The next day it began to storm a bit at noon, though not as bad. Friday it stormed too, but when my dad got home from the airport at 6pm, it all abruptly stopped. And the sun came out.

I swear that's how it happened. I know it sounds improbable.

The next tornado happened only a year later. It was early June of 1990, just after I'd finished 1st grade. It was my second year of dance class, and it was recital weekend. Our rehersal was Friday night and the show was Saturday afternoon. But my parents had a wedding to go to on Friday night, so I had a babysitter who was going to take me to the rehersal.

About 4pm, the black clouds began rolling in. Soon it was storming hard. My sitter began to look nervously out the darkened windows, wondering what to do. I was only concerned with getting to my rehersal, counting down the minutes until we left. But soon the storm let up a tad, just enough for us to hear an erie wail coming over the country. (I'll interject here that it was the ONLY time I ever heard a tornado siren while living in Eau Claire). I kept asking her what it was. At first she claimed she didn't hear it, then she said she heard it but pretended she didn't know what it was (she didn't want to scare me). We stood in the family room listening to the siren and debating what to do. She wondered if we should go in the basement and I kept reminding her that we needed to leave for my rehersal now (haha).

About ten minutes after the siren had finished sounding, my parents pulled up to the house. They'd come from the wedding to check on us because a large tornado had just ripped through the area, not a mile away from our house. They said it was safe to leave now, it was over, so they went back to the wedding and we went in the oppisite direction to town.

It was like a war zone. Huge trees were down everywhere, blocking the highway, and a house had been completely ripped apart. It had been opened like a can of sardines, from the side. I still remember seeing their double bed on the lawn (still intact with all the pillows and blankets on it) and thinking how odd that was.

I'll end the story there, just say that we arrived at the rehersal on a few minutes late and discovered we had forgotten in the storm to bring makeup. My sitter taught me a valuable lesson that night, she taught me how to do all your makeup with only half a tube of lipstick (all she had in her purse)!

It's late (and storming again!) so more "Storm Stories" tomorrow!