Digital Analogue

Well, *that* was interesting

I don't ever remember being actually alerted to a tornado warning by the air raid sirens before. In fact, I don't ever remember hearing them aside from at 10am on the first Tuesday of the month.

I was puttering around in the kitchen, when all of a sudden I felt a cool breeze from outside. Since it had been almost 90 just a little while earlier, this was surprising; and indeed the sky was black and the clouds were racing. I took Nutmeg outside real quick before the rain started, thinking, this'll be one helluva thunderstorm. The temperature had dropped close to 30 degrees in less than an hour.

Moments after I got back inside, then, I heard the air raid sirens. After a brief moment of shock, my raised-in-the-Midwest hindbrain kicked in, and I grabbed my phone, a book, and my dog, and went down into the basement. I then smacked my forehead and ran back up to grab a portable radio. After finding a station, I ascertained that the sirens were indeed for a tornado warning over western Knox County; an actual funnel had been sighted about three miles northwest of Galesburg.

So I sat out the warning down there. Apparently the extent of the damage within the city was a downed tree blocking North Prairie St; no funnel clouds here (thanks, St. Crescent). Now, it's just raining (and not even that hard, considering) and, occasionally, thundering.

UPDATE: It's St. Crescent who protects Galesburg from tornadoes. Silly me.

"Our present prisons ... find or make men guilty, ... enclose wretches for the commission of one crime, and return them, if returned alive, fitted for the perpetration of thousands...." --Oliver Goldsmith, "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766)