Sirens!

For as long as I can remember, I've heard the warning sirens go off here in my fair city every Friday at 11:00am. It's the weekly test, you know, just in case we get raided or tornadoed or something. I really don't have memory of the sirens ever going off for reals. It's one of those things that no one around here pays much attention to. Every once in a while one will stop for a second and go, "Oh, it must be 11 o' clock."

Sunday evening at around 7, Brianna and I sat in the living room contemplating going to get some DQ.
"You want something?"
"I don't know, do you?"
"Let's go. I want a blizzard."
"K."
Neither of us moved.
"We should go before it rains."
"Yeah, it looks bad over that way."
Movement nada.

The two youngest were outside playing at the next door neighbors' house. Then, we heard the sirens. Slow realization came over both Brianna and me and we looked at each other.
"Is that the sirens?" We both said it nearly in unison.  We jumped up and, of course, RAN OUTSIDE! It's kind of like when the stupid girl in the horror movie goes outside to check on the noise. Yeah.

Pretty much everyone else in the neighborhood was out on their porches because SIRENS! The kids came running home and what followed was some sort of tornado chaos which can only be described as...well, you know that scene in Edward Scissorhands when the daughter comes home and sees Edward in her bed for the first time and he punctures the bed and everyone is screaming and yelling and Edward is just kind of wandering in circles and down the hall?  That.

I'm trying to make the flipper work and find a channel which is actually reporting weather while simultaneously unplugging my laptop and running through the house looking for the keys to the church next door so we can go to that basement because our basement? NO. That's another story. Brianna is on her phone looking at a weather report and a tornado touched down IN OUR CITY! Tornado warning! Tornado WARNING!
She's also running back and forth through the house for..I don't know what and then turns the radio in the kitchen up to BLARING so we can listen to the National Weather Service announcement. Jameson is following me half crying. "Mommy, is there going to be a tornado? Is there going to be a tornado? Is there a tornado?" Braelyn is saying goofy things to distract Jameson. I'm yelling, "Get the dog leash!" Which Brianna does, but then the dog sees it and thinks we're taking him for a walk so he's jumping around and doing doggie circles in front of the door. We find keys, finally, and Brianna runs OUT INTO THE WEATHER to see if one of the keys actually belongs to the church, then runs back. At some point she is talking to her boyfriend on the phone and they get disconnected. I'm calling my parents to see if they are going to their basement and if they need help getting there to which my father replies, "Nah, I'll just push her down." (referring to my mother) and I try to call Bubba who is in Indy reffing a basketball game but can't get through. Brianna runs upstairs to save her prized posession (her blankie), her boyfriend calls back in hysterics thinking Brianna has blown away to the Land of Oz and then Bubba calls back but can't hear because of the noise where he is and he somehow thinks the tornado blew the church away.

Then, it stopped raining and cleared up.

And we went to Dairy Queen.

Totally Unrelated Photo Of The Day

Jameson and his gamer buddy, Jeremy