Hurricanes, Evacuations and Tornados

We watched news reports while living in Norway on hurricanes Katrina and Rita. International News reports: vastly different from what I was reading on the internet on MSNBC.com. If there is one thing I learned about the the news while living abroad is that you can take any story and 'spin' it however you want. The gist was always for ANYTHING that the Americans were a 'bloody incompetent lot'. It got old, so I stopped watching much news. Even now I surf the web for my news, I don't even know my cable station number for CNN, NBC ... none of 'em.

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We got back and noticed something odd - people had changed when it came to hurricanes. The word that comes to mind is 'skittish'. It seemed as if they were / are always over reacting and since we were not here - whatever had happened to them, had not happened to us. So this summer we have just shook our heads over some of the things going on.

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Jessie is being evacuated tomorrow to Brenham State school till I don't know when. Gary is catching an early flight home on Friday since his company was suggesting this, and Ryan and I discussed it all while renewing his drivers license and eating out. We were shaking our heads.

Then, this evening I remembered ...

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I remember the day a tornado hit our other house when we lived in Sugar Land before moving to Norway. Jessie was home and we were upstairs. I picked her up and ran down the stairs to get into the only interior room we had in the house - a half bath. Our dog Chance would not come. I was screaming like a maniac at him and he could tell something was wrong, but he was no way going in that tiny room. I kept the door open trying to coax him in, afraid glass would shatter any moment and hurt him. I watch the trees in our back yard bend to a 45 degree angle, and chunks of fence swirl around. I have never seen (or heard) anything like what I saw out those windows before or since. When it has passed, there was a boat in the street, power lines down, part of our roof gone and trees all over our front yard.

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I remembered that still - if the sky gets dark and swirly, so does my stomach.

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I remembered calling my mom in the middle of a full blown panic attack because the sound of the rain lashing at our front door reminded me of the sound right before the tornado hit.

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I remember driving into bad weather last year, watched a funnel cloud dip down out of the dark mass of clouds and feeling as if all the blood in my body was heading to parts unknown ... as if I was going into hypovolemic shock.

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I watch Ryan, also, as the sky gets dark - he starts to panic (he was at school under his desk when the tornado went through - Jessie was home sick).

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So ... who are we to judge?