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4.23.2002

I'll Never Get Used to It

This place scares the crap out of me!

As a native Californian, earthquakes are my natural disaster of choice. With an earthquake you have no idea it’s coming, and when it does your heart rate increases a little for two or three seconds and it’s over.

With a tornado you have countless days of tracking the weather for a good three months, watching those bright red circles travel across the Doppler image and praying they don’t make it to your county. When they do, the sirens that have been secured to extremely tall concrete poles go off, bringing back all your childhood memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I didn’t have a bomb shelter then, and I don’t have a storm cellar now. If the sirens go off, we’ll have to tuck all seven of us (4 adults and 3 teens) in the downstairs bathtub with a mattress over our heads and wait either until we hear the all-csiren, or until our house gets picked up off the ground around us. Give me a good old fashioned earthquake any day!