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[telophase]

Last night, I went out to buy video games, and ended up with Okami, Final Fantasy X, and Destroy All Humans (I got 1 free if I bought 2, and none of the others that had been recommended so far were in). Played Okami through the introductory this-is-how-you-play-lets-practice bits. I think my favorite parts of it are where I can make the wolf avatar of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu smack her head into a large rock at great speed. The boy has FFXII and Shadow of the Colossus and will lend them to me. Don't let this stop you recommending games, though: it's nice to ahve a library of recs to go back to. :)

But that's not what this post is about. As I was starting the drive home, I looked into the sky in the direction I was originally going to go, and saw a spectacular set of stormclouds - the kind that are very dark an ominous and go up into the sky just about forever, and also have a bottom portion that seems to be hitting a roof in the atmosphere and instead boils over and down, the way that dry ice will boil over the lip of whatever vessel it's in. Sort of like this, only more spectacular. I cursed not having my camera with me, and decided to drive home the long way round instead of taking the highway, as it appeared to be planted smack dab over Highway 30, where I needed to go.

As I drove, the sky continued to look spectacular, with areas where it was clear and areas of stormclouds. A long line of stormclouds eventually pushed its way south over the road I was on, and when I was one stoplight from the light where I needed to turn north to get home, I looked up at the clouds just in front of me, and spotted distinct rotation. O.o I wasn't the only one who saw it - all of us at the stoplight floored our cars as soon as the light was green. I believe the slowest of us was doing about 55 mph on this 40mph road. :) I drove home, as a sickly yellow light infused the sky (along with the brightest rainbow I'd ever seen, which was a double one), and got home with no incident.

No tornado ended up touching down, but I still don't ever want to see rotation in the clouds above me. :P

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Adrenaline! It's what's for dinner.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

No kidding. Despite living in Tornado Alley most of my life, I have never seen a live tornado. And I'd prefer not to see one that closely.

[anderson-t.livejournal.com]

That happened down here once, watched it round up in the sky, and then snake down. It was weird. Though we never saw it touch the ground, it supposedly destroyed part of the HEB later on that night. Yep - that was our first month in Austin, about 7 years ago.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

One night when I was in highschool and up at the A&M library goofing off with friends researching for a report, we had some sort of weather event out at my parents' place, 8 miles outside of town. We think that a mini-tornado touched down, as we had a wee trail of destruction about 2 feet wide through the front acreage. :)

A couple of years earlier, a mini-tornado had gone through an apartment complex in town and torn a few shingles off the roof and dumped a set of mailboxes onto the nearby cars. I remember the newspaper article where a resident said he was on the phone, and turned to look out the window just as this wee skinny tornado passed by outside. XD

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's really exciting! I have never seen the clouds do anything like that so I wish you had your camera too :(

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I should get into the habit of carrying it everywhere, Just In Case. But I don't, which is one of the reasons why I'd never make it as a professional photographer. XD

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

I have been throwing mine in my purse because I take pictures of the action figures at work. (Who doesn't love seeing Sephoroth, Vincent, and the gang cha-cha?) But then I have a pretty cheap camera so I am not worried about it being damaged in my purse either. Though in those instances you are supposed to have a disposable camera in your dashboard in case you get into an accident.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I got a small Pentax ("the Altoids camera") partly because it's totally true that the camera you have with you is the best camera you own. (The one that's too bulky/too good/too complicated is not going to be in your pocket.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. My D50, which I love to death, is too expensive to be hauling around with me on the off chance that I'll see something picture-worthy.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Yikes! Plains storms can be so fucking scary. And localized. I had a tornado take the plants off my porch and drop into the backyard. Very scary. Happy to hear you're safe.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And people wonder why I don't particularly like the Great Plains. Hours of driving to get anywhere, and tornadoes.

I posted a story about a localized one in response to another comment. :) And I had a friend tell me that a tornado went through her parents' land one early morning. Only damaged one tiny corner of the house, but it removed the entire barn from around the horses that were in it, and her parents found the horses still standing where their stalls had been, going "I didn't do it! Not my fault!" I think they lost a goat and a few chickens, but I don't quite remember.

[flamika.livejournal.com]

Sweet Jesus, I would have had a heart attack. We got the very edge of those thunderstorms, I think. The rain was coming in sideways for like ten minutes, but after that, the sun was back.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It was a split-second decision to go straight on to the next light, right under the rotation, rather than turn north at the light I was stopped at. I knew that I could get home via the next road, but wasn't sure about the closest road and I wanted to minimize the amount of time I was outside. There were moments I wasn't quite sure I'd made the right decision. *twitch*

The whole area had scattered thunderstorms - there were areas of the sky where it was black as pitch, and other areas where the sky was clear. Spectacular sunset, though.

[chomiji]

What a welcome home!

The only time I ever saw a funnel cloud (and we get about one per year around the Wash. DC area), I was too young and naive to know what I was looking at. We were driving home from the county fair, and I looked out the window at the stormy sky and then lectured my younger sister pompously: "Look, Amy, there's a cloud shaped like a map of India!"

My father glanced back and started driving a little faster ... .

[telophase.livejournal.com]

XD My parents saw one when I was away at college. They were eating at a reastaurant in town, and the waiter came by and told each table there was a tornado outside, in case anyone cared to go look. I think it was outside the city limits and never came into town - one of those long, loopy ones that don't do that much damage. The restaurant was across the street from the newspaper offices, and my mom said there were lots of photographers who rushed out and were snapping away like mad.

[marith.livejournal.com]

Eeeeeeeee! Yes, I think I prefer earthquakes. At least you can't see them coming.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about natural disasters and decided I'd prefer hurricanes to anything else, since you get several days' warning nowadays.

[chisotahn]

Augh that would have killed me ded. On the spot. Of raw fear.

(And re: Okami - later on you can make Amaterasu do much more... iiiinteresting and undignified things. I'm not going to say what, because it's better that way, but...)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I wasn't quite sure whether I had made the correct conclusion as regards the rotation* until the light turned green and everyone else floored their cars, too. XD

(I shall look forward to it!)

* because I always second-guess myself, even when I know I'm right.

[emtigereyes.livejournal.com]

Yikes! Glad to know you got home alright, and that all of you gunning it from that light didn't end up in a panicky heap.

The only time I've seen rotation clouds over me, the tornado was on its way back into the clouds. It'd just torn up the mall north of us, but we didn't know that. All we saw was the edge of the clouds in the distance, highlighted by the setting sun, with a strange conical shape poking down (It was a few miles away at the time).

Me, standing at the large glass window:
"Huh, that kind of looks like a tornado."
Brother, coming over next to me:
"Yeah, it does kind of look like a tornado."
Mother, coming up behind us:
"OH MY GOD! TORNADO!!!"

*Mother starts scrambling all over the house, getting the closet under the stair clear, finding flash lights, and turning on the TV to weather channel. Brother and I just stand there looking, completely calm in our obliviousness*
"Gee, I've never seen one before."

Yes, we left the window before things were dangerous and helped prepare our dive hole, though we didn't end up needing it. It's just that, in hindsight, my brother's and my curiosity was quite humorous, esp. against the backdrop of a panicked mother.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Hee. I think that if I were around calm poeple, I'd be panicking, but when other people panic, I go into a calm mode which is less true calmness and more superciliousness. XD

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

I love living in England. No deadly animals (except maybe the mysterious moor beasts) and very little crazy weather. Tornadoes have always scared the hell out of me, as a little kid I used to have nightmares about them and I have about a 0.01% chance of ever seeing one. In fact I think it's the only natural disaster scenario that frightens me. Hurricanes you get warning about, earthquakes are pretty rare in a strength to cause serious life loss and damage, volcanoes are static and you can just avoid going near them and if a huge asteroid hits the earth there's not much any of us can do about it so I'm not going to have a break down over it on the off chance it happens. :)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Technically the UK has more tornadoes relative to land area than any other landmass except for the Netherlands. :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Tornado_(UK)
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art28614.asp
http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/1999/05/21.html

It's just that they do less damage and are relatively weak. :)

NOT TO PANIC YOU OR ANYTHING.

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

WAH! I'M GOING TO DIE!! *Panics in my newly found knowledge, starts clearing out the cupboard under the stairs*

I'm surprised to see East Anglia is one of the "hotspots" since I've lived here all of my life and have never seen even a tiny, weedy tornado. I'll have to start watching dubious cloud formations again, I remember I used to do that until about the age of 14, but then I grew out of it when my adult brain told me I was being silly. :)

I usually only have nightmares about tornadoes when I'm stressed out about something and put under huge life changing strain. It seems to be how my sub-conscious tells me everything is going to be taken away/ changed in a dramatic fashion.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

(I still have nightmares about tornadoes.)

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

Tornados scare the crap out of me, but they do spawn from the coolest cloud formations.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. Nothing like being torn between annoyance that you don't have your camera and terror that a tornado might touch down on top of you.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

YIKES.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

YIKES indeed. Just posted the A-Kon report, thirty seconds ago. :)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Ah, tornado weather, when there are no speed limits. Only time you'll ever get cops telling you to floor it.

We had about one impressively near one every three years or so when I was growing up in Ohio, and I still remember a picture that made the front page of the paper: skyscraper, tornado, skyscraper, tornado, and you could hardly tell them apart. They didn't touch, so they didn't do any significant damage.

Speaking of natural disasters, have you ever heard the algorithm on hurricane categories?

Category 1: your stuff should not be outside.
Category 2: your cat should not be outside.
Category 3: you should not be outside.
Category 4: your car should not be outside.
Category 5: your house should not be outside.

(I was told this one by a friend who had to evacuate from Houston during Rita and paused after 5 to say 'YOU SEE THE PROBLEM WITH MY LIFE?')

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I have friends who used to live in a building next to the Bank One building in downtown Fort Worth that got slammed by a tornado. :D

I hadn't heard that. XD

[celestriad.livejournal.com]

whoa, that's pretty scary! but at least you got to see some cool skyscapes without actually ending up in trouble. ^^;

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. I appreciate extreme weather ... from a distance. XD

[celestriad.livejournal.com]

me too. XD;