Twister'd

 First of all, I will state that the wife and I are safe and sound after the tornadoes that rolled through the Omaha area last night. We got some rain, some light hail, and some light thunder...and that was it. We were very lucky. I went to bed after dinner and Daisy assembled and installed our new cat tree downstairs for the children -- for us, personally, it was a non-event.

However, for a lot of the Omaha surrounding area, it very much was not a non-event.

I don't really have to go into a lot of detail if you're familiar with the area or have paid attention to any of the news for the past 36 hours or so, local or national -- we had two different tornadoes hit the Omaha area. One was classified as an EF-3 that hit the Elkhorn area, northwest of the city proper, and did a lot of damage. The second was classified as an EF-2 that hit Eppley Airfield -- Omaha's airport that we've flown in and out of many times over the years -- and did some significant damage to some of the private "general aviation" hangars but nothing else.

Nobody died. Hundreds of homes were destroyed. Thousands were without power and still are, even now. Cleanup and rebuilding is underway for all of those people.

I've been within 10-15 miles of a tornado before, when I was living in the Kansas City area 15 years ago of more. As a child, on a road trip from West Virginia to Utah and back, I was a few miles away from a tornado traveling across Nebraska that summer (1991). When I lived in Kansas -- for five years -- the closest any tornadoes got to me were 20-30 miles away. Eight years ago today, a tornado wall cloud went right over the Omaha metro, dumped a lot of hard rain and hail, but never actually really touched down anywhere.

The EF-2 tornado that missed us and hit the airport is 8.1 miles from my house. The EF-3 that destroyed a large chunk of Elkhorn and the surrounding area was 11-18 miles from my house. In the grand scheme of things, the size of the country as a whole, that is a hair's width distance from where I am and everything, everyone I know and love. 

This is why I get very stressed and very anxious when bad weather is predicted or moving in. Daisy and I discussed it this afternoon so that she could attempt to understand my mindset, my anxiety, because she really doesn't have it. 

It's the loss of control. 

Almost everything that gives me stress or anxiety boils down to the fact that I can't control or prevent the triggers for those feelings. Tornadoes (or other severe, damaging storms) I can't prevent, I can't control where they go, I can't avoid them or find some way to not deal with them. I don't have superpowers or a magic wand. I am forced to accept that what's going to happen is going to happen and whether I like it or not I am going to have to deal with it, and that's what stresses and frankly angers me. I don't get stressed, anxious, or angry about things I have control of, or have control of the situation for -- because I can either fix those things or avoid them. If there's an action I can take to prevent, end, or remove myself from a situation why would I stress about it? The answer is, I don't -- I take those actions and go on with my life. 

Proponents of pharmaceuticals would likely say that I should be on some anti-anxiety medication for all of this, and I vehemently disagree. Why? Medicine doesn't fix the problem, it doesn't magically stop shit from happening. I'm not going to take a pill that makes tornadoes go away, because that pill does not exist. I don't have that sort of anxiety where I'm frozen, the "I'm so anxious I can't do anything and can't function" anxiety -- yes, those people need medication because that's a genuine issue. Like the people who need to take a pill to function in society, to get out of bed and go to their job every day and attempt to be normal, yes, they need those pills and I am not dismissing that. I do not need that sort of medication -- I function perfectly fine. I just hate not being in control of my own destiny -- I don't need a pill that dulls my senses and makes me functionally care less about it. Dulling my perception or care about it does not remove the circumstances and does not remove the danger or its effects. It would turn me into a mindless drone. It is my emotions that remind me who I am, that let me know I am alive and an individual mind amongst what appears to be very few individual minds still left out there these days.

Anyway.

The storm threat started on Thursday, with some moderate storms through the area in the overnight hours -- nothing major but enough to make Hank, Empress, and Sadie all cower under my desk with me at my feet for a while, incredibly concerned with the booming outside.

Then, there was yesterday -- when I woke up, went to the bathroom, and walked into my room, and before I could even turn on my computer for the day the sirens started going off. As soon as that happened, Daisy texted me that she was coming home from work -- which she did, very quickly. The sirens went off eight times in a two-hour span of frankly terrifying time. I counted. Each one was another warning for another part of the county, or an extension of an existing warning.

Once the threat was over yesterday, and my nerves could calm, I cooked us dinner and did all of the dishes, put away the leftovers, and told the wife that I was shot, the stress was leaving my body and I needed to crash again -- and per my FitBit, I was asleep by 8:51 PM. I'd only been awake for a little less than six hours.

Today we were under a similar threat that was set to play out with almost the exact same timing as yesterday. As predicted, it got dark and stormy around 4pm -- we got a little rain, some thunder, and a little lightning -- but as I was following everything on the news and local weather coverage this time around, I was considerably less anxious and nothing moved through that was severe (though there were some tornadoes south of us in Kansas and Missouri). Once I knew we were safe, I passed out once more in the chair in my office and slept until well after 10pm.

Tomorrow the severe threat is minimal -- so they say. Likely nothing major for our area, but the possibility is still there for something significant. There's another chance for severe weather on Tuesday too, and then off and on storm chances for the better part of the next ten days after. This is Nebraska in the spring -- this is what it's like here, especially in April and May. We've been lucky for the past few years that nothing has really hit the Omaha area directly, until this weekend. The last awful storms we had that hit here directly were the ones that took out our retaining wall in 2019. That was literally five years ago next month. 

As I told Daisy earlier -- I don't want to live here anymore. I don't know how much longer I can do it and still keep my sanity. I really like Omaha for the most part but I cannot fathom spending the rest of my life in a place where we have the hottest summers, the coldest winters, and some of the worst severe weather possible in the spring. It's torture for me to just have to deal with it and have no control when something happens.