Well That's Not How I Was Planning to Spend My Afternoond

I woke up at 2:15pm on Sunday afternoon.

I was already two hours behind schedule in my plan to turn my life around and become a productive human being who does not regularly run four hours late for things.

I typed Netflix in my internet browser. Because, hey, I was already two hours behind. Why not make it three?

And that's when I started to wonder about the thunder outside.

Is this a hurricane? I thought. Should I be taking cover and sprouting lentils?

So I interrupted my Netflix search to check storm warnings in the area.

At 2:17pm, two minutes into my plan to ignore my plan to turn my life around and become a productive human, I read a tornado warning for my city.

Not two blocks down. Not maybe around the corner. Not next week around noon.

Now. In my neighborhood.

So I called my mom.

"How's your day?" she asked.

"Not that great. I took a nap and woke up to a tornado warning."

"What?"

"A TORNADO WARNING."

"Turn on the news."

The meteorologist told me it was serious, to take cover, and hole up somewhere on a bottom floor.

BUT I LIVE ON THE TOP FLOOR.

NOOOO!

The  wind started hitting my window, my anxiety kicked in, and I seriously contemplated asking the downstair neighbors to let me stay awhile.

But I was too scared to walk down the stairs.

So instead...

Wait for it.

I lifted my queen size mattress off my box spring, dragged it through the bathroom door (which took some maneuvering--at one point I didn't think it would fit) and put it right against the bathtub. And then I crawled inside the bathtub and sat there for more than an hour. Every time the wind got louder, I pulled the mattress closer to the bathtub. At one point, I tried lifting the mattress into the bathtub, but it wouldn't fit. In the event of a real natural disaster, I am going to need a better emergency plan.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world was hanging out at Disney World 5 minutes down the road.

Not me though. I was sitting in my bathtub fort, contemplating life and the possibility of my ceiling falling in.

By 4pm it was sunny outside.

The wind had subsided.

I think I made a taco.



And so concluded the great and terrible tornado warning of 2013.

Which was almost as bad as the terrible tornado warning of 2012. Which was only worse because I spent it in a Best Western hotel in Biloxi, MS. And I didn't even have any lentils to sprout there.