We've been waiting
Up early before the young ones... feels like there are somehow potato chip shards and emerald green glitter, everywhere... switch on “The Chieftains” via Alexa... advise Yali and Patience to get their bike helmets prepared for strange weather coming later in the day...
Patience and I are gone before eight o'clock back to the KTVI studios for the fifth and final TV spot of the season where the other show team dancers are gathering... sit with the parents and chat with M's Italian-New-Yorker dad about baseball and ChatGPT until the girls' segment, which is about sixteen seconds in total length and makes all the parents laugh for all the effort involved for such a short clip...
Patience returns home shortly later to invest in intense battle with Yali over the disappearance of a jar of Nutella...
Divert them back to the three R's which somehow includes Yali massively exploding a silver metallic paint pen all over the living room floor... but things calm down after a few minutes and Yali continues writing in his creative story about a mansion that includes an arcade and slushie machine...
Also begin wind and storm preparations with up to baseball-sized hail predicted... Oxbear flips the trampoline upside-down so it isn't air-lifted into the atmosphere later...
Meanwhile Yali starts running around with my old empty arrow quiver capsule on his arm, drilling it like a robot Tommy gun as he walks around the house...
Performance number nine is at St. Luke's Hospital in the cafeteria for a sizable crowd feasting on paper baskets of chicken tenders and fries which Patience eyes hungrily... the hospital staff is appreciative, and Patience “bids farewell” to her BFF leaving for Florida the next day “if our plane isn't blown off the tarmac tonight” her mom notes, maybe with a touch of concern... the forecast is a significant one this time...
Home long enough to scrub some dishes before ducking back out with the two youngest for two different parks... the sun is warm in a snapping and erratic wind, rolling through new spring buds, taking ten billion crunchy leaves with it... and Yali wipes the skin off his elbow tumbling too enthusiastically down a slide, gets one of the eclectic band-aids from my wallet...
We stop for ice cream on the way home as I find myself having to explain to both kids that – no – neither of them are legally allowed to become President of the United States... moose tracks and double strawberry and pineapple Dole whip and cinnamon-crunch ice cream taco shells... a splurgy kind of week...
Home once more... but instead of continuing with cleaning and laundry, the wind is too enormous and beautiful to escape it yet... as a cover of silver pushes in fragments from the west... both boys join me on a walk around the neighborhood... gusts must be striking well past 30mph as we walk the 1.3 miles noting gutters and siding already ripped from houses and a gorgeous velvet swish through all the pines along the way... as we return, discussing things like church denominations and doctrine and the enzymes in pineapples, Puck sees the basketball hoop tumbled over with the backboard cracked against a patio chair (gratefully missing Oxbear's smoker)...
“MA!” Puck calls for me shortly later – they all want Cane's Chicken for dinner... so Oxbear, Yali, and I take my Civic into the wind... waiting on the parking lot for Oxbear to post a package through UPS, the wind is so strong it feels what it must be like to sit through a minor earthquake... limbs and full trees down in the whirling gusts as we pick up boxes of chicken...
A couple of hours later while Oxbear is setting up the air mattress in the basement for the kids and I'm collecting medications, car keys, wallets, water bottles, charged devices, etc... the first siren... sibling text blowing up – “This is a big boi” Elmer announces with a “Here we go” – and Puck brings his cat wrapped up in a large blanket to the basement... storm tracking on the laptop... Puck grabs an apple to sit in a chair on the back patio to watch the lightning show...
About five sirens later and lots of communication and radar and reports and big wind and lighting and thunder and pounding rain and only pea-sized hail and lots of talk of polygons and hooks, and tornados sandwiched around us... near ten o'clock... the storm mostly moves east... and somehow the power never even fully goes out...