The tornado story

Weather this week in Kansas has been - well, typical spring weather for Kansas. Cloudy, clear, raining, clear, etc. Throw in a few tornado warnings and tornado watches and you pretty much have Kansas in the springtime.

Monday was no different than any other May morning. Forecast for rain and possible dangerous storms for the late afternoon. I was scheduled to go at 5:30 to look at houses with a realtor. He didn't call to cancel, so I guessed he wasn't bothered by the threat of rain.

It's easily 30 minutes from our house to the first house on the list, and I didn't want to be late. Plus, I was picking up a friend and had to go to her house first. Ron was (and is) in no shape to be traipsing in and out of houses. I figured I'd find some, put them on the short list, and then take him back to look at the ones I deemed appropriate for us. So, I left at 4:30 and headed to my friend's house. About half way there, the tornado horns sounded. I called Ron and told him that the sirens were going off and he needed to be aware of how much time it would take him to get to the basement. In the meantime, realtor calls and leaves a voice mail that he thinks it would be best to cancel.

It's now 5:00 and I'm in town, literally 15 minutes away from the first house on the list. I call him back and get HIS voice mail. The weather was doing strange things because my phone hadn't even rung but had gone straight to voice mail. By the time he calls me back, it is raining pretty hard and we decide that canceling is in the best interests of the occupants of the homes. (Come to find out, they were ALL vacant except one!) I had no problem with canceling but he could have called at any point in the day and said he thought the weather would be too bad to go. No problem. Instead, I spent nearly an hour driving into town and back - in rain and hail on the way back. By the time I got home - the storm had PASSED and the sky was blue!

I get in the house and Ron informs me that he fell off the wheelchair ramp (this is not the first time). Instead of walking DOWN the ramp and around to the other side, he tried to step off the ramp and promptly fell on top of things (I have stuff I'm collecting for our garage sale) and pulled the lawn mower over on top of himself. He thought he needed the crank radio so he would "know if a storm passed over." Of course, I was relieved that he was OK, but I darn near scalped him. I said if he'd been in the basement like he was supposed to be, and a tornado blew over, he'd darn sure know about it WITHOUT the radio. On the other hand, if he'd broken something and not been able to get up off the garage floor - AND a tornado blew over, he'd darn sure know it THEN, too! He was lucky that none of the glass items he fell in broke and impaled him. As it is, he's got a bruise on his right hip and many abrasions on his left shin, thigh, and forearm. The big doofus!

He said he just felt like he needed the radio but after he landed on the floor and couldn't get up, he realized that maybe, just maybe, he should have just left the TV on and gone down to the basement.

Well, duh!