Last night, we were blown about by many tornadoes. Not Itzl and Xoco and I personally, but our neighborhoods and local towns. We didn't get it as bad as Joplin.
I live in the hinge of all the storm activity, where it is usually calmer and there's less destruction. Ice gets us, and snow. We're too high for flooding, being on the top of a range of hills. You'd think that would make us a target for tornadoes, but tornadoes and hailstorms all seem to split just before they get to our area, careening north and south of us and rejoining just east.
I'm grateful for whatever features cause the storms to do this. My house has stood undamaged by storms for 70 years. May it stand so for 7 times that (unless it gets torn down and rebuilt as something else...).
My co-workers got sent home early because of the impending storms, but my boss forgot to give me permission to leave, so I stayed my entire shift. In the end, it didn't matter because neither my workplace nor my home was affected, nor the route between them. This morning, none of my co-workers suffered anything worse than lost power.
Itzl was nervous at work because I think the tornado sirens were sounding. Security didn't say anything to me, so I had no human confirmation, and we are blocked from the websites I could have checked. I have no clue why we are blocked from those sites...
When we left work, we stopped at the post office to drop off the work mail, then headed home. The clouds were high and light and the wind no worse than the day before. After only a few miles, Itzl alerted on a siren. I didn't see any flashing lights, so I assume it was a tornado siren.
After we got home, I let Itzl and Xoco play in the back yard a while - no rain was falling. In fact, the sun was out.
As I went into the snuggery to turn on the TV to the news channel, Itzl dashed back into the house alert on a siren and to herd us to the safe place. Xoco wasn't having any of it - she wanted to stay in the snuggery, where it was sunny and comfy.
I gave him the stand down and watched the news. Yes, there were tornadoes on the ground, but not near and not heading our direction.
With power still on, I went online to check in with our search and rescue groups. Itzl's not much of scent dog, but he's killer when it comes to hearing faint sounds of survivors, so we spent much of the dark windy night prowling through Piedmont tagging places for the work crews to haul away debris. By the time we quit so we could go home and clean up for work, we'd tagged over 3 dozen sites to locate survivors, and at least a dozen of them had been cleared by others and living people taken out.
Itzl, poor pup, is exhausted. I bought him a bacon biscuit for breakfast and he fell asleep with a piece still in his mouth. I tugged it out and he didn't even notice. he twitches in his sleep when someone walks through the door here at work, but doesn't wake fully. It's not a sound he needs to alert on so he only halfway does.