heavy weather

On Thursday morning, it was partially cloudy, but mostly sunny. I went to lunch with a friend, and the weather was pretty nice. We were in the restaurant for about an hour, and when we came out, the sky was pretty dark and it was starting to rain those big droplets to which I've become accustomed living here in the Midwest. It kept getting darker, and within the next 10 minutes, the sky went completely dark, like night. The only difference between this and night was that the darkness had a strange green tint to it. When the sky turns strange colors, that typically means you're in for a tornado or other heavy weather, as I've learned living here and in HK. Anyway, when I got up to my cubicle, almost everyone was standing at the window, watching the storm. The wind was blowing really hard, and a mix of heavy rain and hail was blowing sideways. A couple minutes later, an alarm went off, and we were instructed to go into the stairwells, which serve as a heavy weather shelter. We were in the stairwells for 15 minutes or so, and weren't allowed to leave until the storm passed. It was really hot and smelly in there, between the people still eating their lunches and all the b.o., but at least we were safe. There was no damage at my office, but in some of the suburbs to the south the power went out and many large trees were broken.

This sort of thing scares a lot of people, but not me. I'd rather rather have big storms than the earthquakes with which I grew up in LA, and all the excitement helped to break up what was otherwise a mostly monotonous day.