As you can tell by this entry, I did not blow away in a tornado last night. I had shut down a lot of stuff during the height of the thunderstorms, and had the tv going to let me know if anything were headed down my direct alley. I was packed and ready to run next door to the concrete bunker, but I am not like my mother, who would have spent the night down there with a radio and a kerosene lamp. I am way too claustrophobic to stay in a tornado shelter for any length of time.

Good news in that the thunderstorms lost some momentum just south of us, but it has rained incessantly and we are still under a flood watch until 7 pm. It's not been a hard rain for the most part, thank goodness, and right now it's just a steady drizzle which we actually need around here. That, I can deal with on an OK basis.

I was up almost until dawn, really exhausted from all the fretting more than anything else. I dreamt about taking an exam, one of my recurring dreams, and then about going to some sort of event for which I had to get dressed up. Of course, I could not seem to get my ensemble pulled together. (Anything more than a tshirt and jeans is an ensemble for me.) Part three of the dream was something I'd never had before that I recall. I was borrowing someone else's car to run an errand, and after pulling out of the parking lot, I noted it had no power steering and I was having to muscle this beast to control it. Suddenly, I was having to steer it by looking at a screen inside the car, with a birds'eye view of my location. I could not see out of the car around me and this was the only way to maneuver it. It was like a video game, but I was trying to keep from crashing into some other vehicle around me. A cat bounding across my chest woke me up, keeping me from finding out how well I might have handled the situation.

No word today on my sister's situation. My brother never did call to find out what was going on. He seemed clueless that they could even be in any danger when I talked to him beforehand. Must be nice to live in such a secure little world.

Today being Sunday, I did the routine we have established here: go get some fried chicken and hot apple pies from Popeye's, and take it to have lunch with my mother and Mrs. Harris, her roommate. They chow down on that chicken like it's prime rib, loving the little cinnamon apple pies. It makes them so happy, and it's such a small thing. I did not bring up the hurricane. In fact, well after we had finished eating, I finally said that my sister had taken her cats with her when they left. My mother did not seem overly worried about the property, so I said nothing about it. Some things are best left unsaid.

Instead, I regaled her with stories about what my cats had been into this week, and that a friend had a new baby boy, because she loves to hear baby stories. She enquired after my friends in the UK, because I always have a little anecdote to tell her about the Things, even if it's an old story, because they are new to her. She got a kick out of me playing Scrabble across the internet with Thing One. The time passed, and I left to retrieve my entries from the district fair.

I judged the quilt show in the fair last week, so was ineligible to enter that division, but there was a place in the crafts division where I entered the Daredevil origin quilt panel and the Murdock's Law quilt panel. I am pleased to report that not only did I receive blue ribbons on both, but a whopping prize check of $11.00! I didn't know you got cash at this fair. Maybe next year I can come up with more stuff to enter. Heh.