Not obliterated

I had an exciting President's Day! Yes, Woodland definitely celebrated in style, with meteorological fireworks and everything!

I was going to use the holiday to start work on my proposal for those nasty qualifying exams. Instead I decided that a much better use for the day would be to cover lots of fun-reading ground. I've been reading Middlemarch for a really long time now, and am just never going to finish it if I don't make the effort. My conquest of its 800+ pages has really slowed down since I started seriously studying for my quals a few weeks ago. (I finished reading the Plant Physiology book this weekend, by the way. Online chapters and all!) So yesterday I plowed through 150 pages of George Eliot, leaving only about 200 more. Much more manageable. The end is in sight! Well, sort of...

In the early afternoon I got distracted from my reading by some severe weather conditions. We had a thunderstorm here in the Central Valley! It was so exciting! California never gets thunderstorms! Finally some real weather! And to make it even more real, we got a tornado warning. The best part is that the weather man was highlighting conditions at "113 and Gibson Rd." as being especially likely to form a tornado. Yeah... That's at most a mile from my house. I take 113 to and from Davis every day, almost always using the Gibson Rd. exit. The excitement never ceases! I don't think anything actually happened in Woodland, however. There were funnel clouds at the Sacramento airport, about 10 miles from here, and an actual tornado in West Sacramento, which is also quite close, but no major threats to my house. Phwew =). Of course, the entire storm system completely bypassed Davis.

Tornado warnings used to terrify me. I think partly because my mom had this awful weather radio that would emit an extremely loud alarm whenever there was a severe weather event in the vicinity (which happened to be a large portion of Georgia, so it often went off for no real reason to me). I was much more blase about yesterday's tornado warning. Maybe I'm mellowing.

What made yesterday even more exciting was that the cute guy (remember him?) called to make sure that I knew about the tornado warning and that my house was still standing. Awww, so sweet!