good news!

we haven't blown away.

perhaps some of you have heard about the intense tornadoes oklahoma and the midwest have been experiencing this past week. after receiving several concerned comments and e-mails, i figured it was time to release an official madpony statement of well-being.

i would have written about my personal tornado experience earlier, but i forgot that all of you non-oklahoma people would be interested to hear about us and the big event. a tornado in oklahoma is kind of like an earthquake on the west coast, a hurricane in florida, an avalanche in colorado, or a sand storm in saudi arabia. they just happen every year, we expect them, and we all go outside to watch them.

no, really. anyone who ever has visited or moved to our area will tell you with shock and dismay how completely unalarmed people act in the event of a tornado. while the sirens are blaring, the meteorologists are emphatically directing us towards storm shelters, and non-oklahomans are diving for the nearest cover, oklahomans take to the front porch. i am quite sure that it would take large structural damage to an oklahoman's house before they would actually think that the front porch might not be the safest place to be during a natural disaster.

and my family is no different from your average oklahoman family. even after the may 3 tornado in 1999, an F5 which took out large chunks and 40 lives in our hometown, my family views tornadoes as interesting, yet somewhat blase events.

the pictures i borrowed from our state newspaper show the damage left by the tornado which passed through our state last thursday. i chose it because of the charming ladies perusing the rubble from the comfort of their atv.

this, folks, is your average oklahoman.

i managed to completely miss this tornado. i was in the midst of my beatles final when it passed around 15 miles north of my classroom. the lights flickered several times, but we were largely unconcerned. it wasn't until katie and i left the test and found that the atm and our cell phones weren't working that we began to worry. as we visited the bookstore to sell back our textbooks, we saw some tornado coverage. apparently, as we were finishing our semester finals, a tornado had managed to absolutely decimate a general motors plant among other things which lie almost exactly between our home in oklahoma city and my home at OU.

the second big tornado came last night. mom, dad, and i sat in front of our living room tv watching the coverage. because our weather stations can pinpoint the location of a tornado to the exact street corner, watching a tornado's path on tv can actually be somewhat entertaining. though this tornado was probably only an F3, the usual chaos of the severe weather alert broadcasts was heightened due to the fact that the tornado was headed almost exactly towards the television stations. we cheered as the tornado passed a block south of my dad's office building, dodged our favorite mexican restaurant entirely, and headed straight for the ritzy part of town. after a couple of hours, the coverage began to get a bit redundant so we invented tornado games. every time the forecaster announced a tornado touchdown, dad gave the touchdown signal. finally, with the tornado about an hour east of our city, i stretched out on our sofa and passed out.

so anyway, i just wanted to reassure everyone that madpony headquarters is injury free and safe from structural damage, although we do have some yellow and pink insulation decorating the front yard.

thankfully, these tornados were also without any fatalities.

and i *would* go to the storm shelter, but would life really be worth living if all my shoes blew away?