Whethering the Storm

Last night we had a devil of a storm, and by "we" I mean the entire Baltimore metro area, which is quite a few people on their way home and doing other things from like 4 til 7 PM.  It was a giant thunderstorm that got us, with winds and possible tornadoes right up the road from us in Fallston, and down near the BWI Airport.

But it's not as if we were not ready for the storm.  "Forewarned is forearmed," I always say, unoriginally. The TV weather people had been telling us about this BA storm headed our way since like Wednesday.

We had plans to spend the evening with our niece Laura and her kids; our nephew is out of town and we were just going to run up there with a pizza and chat awhile. I went to the great Pizza John's down in Essex earlier in the day, and got a couple of the 1/2 baked pizzas that they sell to go - just throw them in the oven for 7-9 minutes and stand back out of the way when they come out.  When I was buying the pizzas, I was waited on by two very attractive young ladies, and they were joined by another woman, equally attractive, but closer to my age, which is only young compared to Betty White. Anyway, I was saying to the three of them that it was good to have dinner all bought in advance of the big storms that were coming our way.

The two young beauties stared at me as if I had said the parking lot was knee-deep in marshmallows.  They had no clue about the impending weather.  Clearly, these two have a lot more going on in their lives than sitting around watching the 11 O'Clock News.  They had the look that said if they felt like dancing last night, they would be on the dance floor whether or not there was a flood or a cyclone. And you know they each could have called up to a dozen guys and said, "Come get me - I feel like sushi and pub crawling" and up to two dozen guys would have been out there driving through hell in a handbasket just to please them.

On the other hand, the woman my age knew all about it, from the estimate time of arrival to which areas were expected to be hit the hardest.  I'm sure that if I had asked her the projected rate of rainfall and how many warnings had already been issued, she would have been up on that.

To each her own.  But to the lady...thank you.

Storm damage all over town

The trip to see the family fell short of fruition anyway.  Peggy and I got in the machine and started up the road, but were forced to turn off into a side street when the rain was coming down at such a pace as to obviate forward vision, which is always nice to have when driving.  And then when it slacked off just enough for us to make another attempt to drive up Manor Rd, what looked like a brown river was driving down the other way on Manor Rd.  Boy oh boy was it raining!  And when I saw a log floating along the Manor Rd River, I turned our ship around and went back to safe harbor.

I bet that pizza lady was already home by then with her feet up, watching The Weather Channel.