Monday Memories: another tornado & a near miss

Monday Memories: Did I ever tell you about Texas Tornados & a near miss Dh & I moved to San Angelo, Texas, in 1992 about a month after we got married. And since there was nothing better to do with my time there I decided to go back to college at Angelo State University. But that doesn't have very much to do with my story. Because Texas is in Tornado Alley (that part of our wonderful country that is prone to getting lots of big terrible tornadoes) they would hold Disaster Drills to be prepared for them. Disaster Drills for those of you who haven't heard about them is where they pretend that a big disaster (natural or man made) has hit and test all the city's resources (police, fire, medical) to see if they are ready. So the city decides that do a Tornado Disaster Drill and offers to residents of where we lived to be participants/victims. Being a victim can be really cool. First they have folks come and make you up with fake injuries and then you are given a "part" in the "play"/drill. I really wanted to be a victim but unfortunately I had class that day. I returned home that afternoon to see them cleaning up and found out from a neighbor what the senerio was. They pretended that a tornado came threw destroying my nextdoor neighbor's house (the other half of my duplex) and lots of damage to my house. My DH was watching everything from his office on the computers. So if I had participated he would have seen "female victim @ 12435 OurStreet. Condition: whatever condition they decided I would be in." I was so bummed out. I'm not sure why but that seemed like it would have been really cool for DH to see me on the computer. Oh well... Flash forward to Labor Day weekend, a few years later. DH & I had made plans to go to Las Vegas for a vacation. But before we left, we were invited to a dinner party at our next door neighbor's house. The day started out beautiful but as normal in TX a storm soon blew in. We were busy enjoying the dinner but looking outside from time to time. Soon small hail began to fall and I wondered if we should go move the cars under the carports before the hail got bigger (you don't want to be outside with hail larger than a pea!) But we decided to just keep an eye on it. We flipped on the TV to watch the weather, but nothing bad was happening except there was a tornado watch. After the party when we returned home the news had finally caught up with the storm and we learned that a rather large tornado had hit our town with major damage to DH's place of work. DH made quite a few phone calls to check on things because normally he would have been in charge of clean up and re-construction. But everyone said that it was okay for him to go ahead with his vacation. We left for Vegas the following morning. We check into our hotel room and see the message waiting light flashing on our phone. We thought the message must have been for the previous occupant because we weren't expecting any calls. So we enjoyed our vacation and ignored the light...until the final night of our trip. We figured that we would clear out the message. We then learned that the message was for DH. Luckily it was just some guy from work informing him of the tornado and telling him that it would be okay for him to stay (he didn't have to report to work.) Whew! When we got back we learned that the city had major damage and that a wall of DH's office building had been ripped off! But since they were building a new building DH would have to work from the damaged office for another 5 months (threw the winter) with a sheet of plywood over the window and plastic tarps to keep out the weather. Other than freezing his tail off that winter, the storm wasn't too bad. Oh and my near miss... Way way back when I was a Junior in High School, a guy that I was dating took me to a Major League Pre-Season foot ball game. He didn't live too far from the stadium so we walked. As we were leaving the game we were crossing the entrance to an office building when this car comes roaring into the parking lot. I was right in the middle of the entrance, when BF pushes me out of the way. No one was hurt and the car sped off. Don't know why the car was in such a hurry...probably just a bunch of kids off for a joy ride. Links to other Monday Memories

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