You Get What You Ask For

A couple of days ago I wrote a gloomy post about some gloomy weather.  All I wanted was something in the weather to change, regardless of what it may be.  Well, careful what you ask for.  Today my part of Texas has seven weather warnings:  a tornado watch, strong wind advisory, flash flood warning, two flood warnings, and two severe storm warnings.  The rain is so hard you can barely see anything, the sky is as black as night, and the roar of the wind is chilling.  The storms are coming from the west and cities that experienced this weather a few hours before us are at a stand still with flooded motorways and blown down trees and power lines.  We had a power outage for a couple of hours in the middle of the night and I woke up with a start at the sound of the wind.  But now the real storms have hit, the kind that show up as deep purple on the weather radar.

Now we've had worse weather here before, but we went through this just 16 days ago, and once in January is unusual for us.  Twice is almost hard to believe.  But the weather has caused the change on my mood that I was hoping for.  No, I'm not happily skipping about that there could be houses and buildings damaged, people hurt.  But this weather snapped me out of my winter blues funk as soon as I woke up at 2.30 this morning.  This weather makes you alert; everybody's a little more cautious and almost compassionate.  I've had a call from my mum asking me to let her know when I got to work safely and Zak is keeping in touch more than usual.

I have a vivid imagination, and so when something dark happens my mind can't help flickering over the idea of the worst.  I've spent the morning worried about my mum if she tries to go out to any shops, and if our dogs Pandora and Sheila are okay at home alone (Pandora doesn't like storms very much.  She looks around nervously from window to window.  I'm trying to tell myself that she's curling up to big sister Sheila for support).  Hell, I'm even wondering if the squirrels that live in our backgarden and constantly torment the dogs are okay.

On the flip side, this type of weather does make me a little happy.  When not contemplating the potential dangers of this weather, I excitedly think about how when I get home I'm going to sit in front of the fireplace with a massive cup of tea and a good book, or have a long relaxing bath while the rain beats down on the window next to me, or watch one of my guilty pleasure films with a glass of good wine and a thick blanket.  Knowing my luck, by the time I'm home from work today the sun will be back out.  But until then, it's nice being out of the funk and having something else to think about.