Monday, April 20, 2009

No tornado

We are fortunate, I believe, in that we live a few dozen yards from the town tornado warning system. It used to be a serious pain, as it also served as the call to the volunteer fire brigade, and any time there was an emergency call it would go off --- sometimes scores of times in a week. But the fire brigade has woken to the reality that all of their volunteers carry beepers, cell phones etc, and that they live far away from the siren, so they wouldn't hear it anyway.

So now the siren goes off at shortly after 9am on Mondays, to test the system, and whenever there is a tornado sighted (I believe within the county -- but this is not clear). And goes, and goes and goes. We're still waiting to hear from the town how we are supposed to tell when it is safe to come out of our inner bathroom (the only room in the house without external walls). It would be nice if they had a different sounding siren to announce the end of the alert.

I bring all this up because the siren went off at 1:30 this morning, waking both LOML and I up, and then turned off within a few more seconds, leaving us to wonder whether to continue waking up Boo and Skibo, to usher them into the bathroom, ruining their sleep, or to assume that it was a slip of the finger pressing the button. The weather websites were not too helpful --- or rather, since none of the ones we went to showed a tornado sighting, we assumed it had been a false alarm. Correctly, it seems.

Sleep ruined for the rest of the night, I've felt miserable for the whole day.
And so to bed. No likelihood of weather tonight, I am promised.

Yours, in spite of it all, glad to live within the siren's song,
N.

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