The Finger of God was actually the whole fist

Yeah, I know, I'm a terrible blogger. I let not just days but sometimes even weeks to go by before I post. I'll never be one of those famous bloggers that change the world and blablabla.

Guess what? I just don't care.

Anyway. I live in Oklahoma. We had horrendous weather in the last couple of weeks. Dozens of people died. They sometimes call powerful tornadoes "The Finger of God". How can you call that a tornado that was 2.6 miles wide? That is not a finger, dude, that is fist-size. Even butt-size.

And apparently that thing went from half a mile to 2.6 miles wide in about 30 seconds. Thus, even experienced storm chasers like Tim Samaras got caught unaware and lost their lives. It had multiple vortices.

In one word, it was scary.

I do remember I woke up with bad feelings about weather. I usually don't, even if the forecast is nasty. I know there will be some tornadoes somewhere, but there's that inner little - I don't know, angel, genie, leprechaun - that tells me "it's ok, it won't hit you".

Not this time folks. I woke up with a sense of dread. I had it all day long. And when around 5 pm the storms started forming, I saw all 4 of them supercells and I told the Wild Wolf "now if these things collide it's going to be thick". And they collided, 10 minutes later.

Then I looked again, to the radar, to the TV screen, back to my monitor to various radars, back to the TV screen, and  I got up, got to the TV, pointed with my finger to the screen and told the Wild Wolf "see this rotation near Hinton? This is going to spawn a tornado. And it's going to come straight for us. And it's going to be nasty"

2 minutes later the tornado was born. 5 minutes later it was 0.5 miles wide. Projected path straight to us. But it was a slow mover, and wouldn't reach us before about an hour and a half. So I said "we need to get out of here".

We do not have a storm shelter, due to the various irrational code of ordinances regulations of Midwest City. The same city that about 5 years ago got FEMA grants to build public shelters, and then on January 31st, 2013, closed them. The house is full brick, but I knew it wouldn't last through an EF5.

So we got a blanket, a small pillow, dog food, water, his laptop, got the dogs and off we went. We beat everybody else, but we made the mistake to stop in Norman at a McDonald too much so the crowd caught up with us, and the next 2 hours were spent driving at a snail pace, with half the sky behind us ink-jet black, and on the car radio (actually it was the KFOR TV channel) stories of many tornadoes spawning and pulling back up in the meantime. Finally there was nowhere else to go, and it was about 4 hours after we left the house and the coming of the night had made all storms more tame (if you can call THAT tame) - as in no more tornadoes. So we decided to wait it out and stop and let the storms pass over us. It took about an hour. Winds were probably around 60 mph. heavy rain and little hail, but mostly heavy rain. Then we started to get back home. Took us another couple of hours but we were lucky that none of the roads were really flooded. We got home close to midnight.

And this is the story of that day.

What happened to my garden?

Sigh. Some other day. I'm still very pissed about it.

Not there yet

Well, it did sink in, but I'm not over it. I need to find my balance, my happy place. I had thought I had found it - and that helped me go through everything, but once I got another slap from life, I got thrown out of it again.

The silver lining is that the diagnosis is not idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis - the kind that gives you 5 more years to live from the time of the diagnosis, tops; it's the post-inflammatory pulmonary fibrosis, that has a little bit of a more lenient grip on you. You have a pretty good chance to make it past 5 years. By how much? I don't know. And thinking that I have been complaining of the wheezing for 2 1/2 years, that means that I had it then - your lungs don't start wheezing all of a sudden out of the blue sky. I think that what bothers me the most is the idea of suffocation. That is the one way I didn't want to go when my time comes. I'm terrified of suffocating. Back in 1991 I had double pneumonia. A very severe case of it. It took them a month almost to keep me among the living. Maybe it wasn't a month, it was only 3 weeks, but it sure seemed like 2 years. I still remember how I couldn't breathe, how my breath stank of pus. How I had not one, but two IVs that were bringing not one, not two, not three, but four different antibiotics in my blood stream, to try and fight it. and of course, being communist Romania, they didn't have oxygen, so I was fighting to breathe by myself. I remember how many times I was hallucinating because of the fever. The thin blanket I was covered with in the hospital seemed to weigh a ton, and I couldn't move it, and there were little leprechauns that could move it for me if I would bribe them. I don't remember what I had to give them as a bribe. But you get the idea.

I've been trying to snap out of it for three days now. I have a lot of things to do and don't seem to be able to pull myself together. I have to finish the Tree of Life website, to work on jewelry and sculptures and if possible, continue my online class in medical transcription. All I managed to do today was to write two articles on the website. Two. Well, I was also able to do some housekeeping, mostly laundry and some kitchen cleaning and cooking, but that was it. I am tired. I feel like I walked 100 miles pulling a millstone tied around my waist. I don't know how much of it is the chronic pain, how much is the pulmonary fibrosis or how much is me fighting depression. I do not want to get depressed. I know I sound gloomy, but I do have a lot of things planned. Depressed people don't have lots of things planned, things that are long-range, that imply that you need to be alive 2 and 3 and 5 years from now, right?

I can't wait for spring. This is how spring is - 4 years ago, my front lawn, March 8. The first butterfly of the year. Little did I know that that fall I would be wondering if I'll ever see a spring again. And here I am, almost four years later, and looking forward to spring. Because I know when spring comes I will be here, and working my garden. And planting parsley and dill specially for the caterpillars of the black swallowtail, so the butterflies would have a place to lay their eggs, and the pretty caterpillars something to munch on and grow and become butterflies. And the photo of the catterpillars thriving on the parsley, last summer.