"Are you scared yet?"
"Get scared!"
You know how you instinctively jump off of one foot and onto the other when you realize you've just stepped on something sharp. Well, that happened to me Thursday night. Only, the thing I jumped away from was a pin that was flat side up. It just went down into the carpet and bent a bit. No harm to my foot. Unfortunately, I jumped ONTO a needle. It went WAY into my foot and hurt REALLY bad. Then it stopped hurting and I realized I had to pull the thing out. Dillon wasn't going to do it for me. When I pulled it out, I got an impressive blood geyser, the splatter from which is pictured below. Luckily, most of it landed on that chair. Only a bit on the carpet. Now I have a cute little bruise on the bottom of my foot. I will admit, I was pretty shaken up. I realized last night, when I tried to use the needle to sew, the tip is still in my foot. Oh, well.
Look at all those little curls. Bye-bye curls.
I wasn't scared during the haircut. I got scared a few minutes later. See how dark it looks out the windows behind Dillon's head. It was about 5:45pm. I put Dillon in the bath and then ran downstairs to answer the phone. Mark wanted to be sure we were ok since the sky was green and the tornado sirens were going off. 'Tis the season. I hung up with him and turned on the radar long enough to hear, ..."tornado in U City headed east at..." I didn't wait to hear how fast it was moving since I live on the border of east U City and west St. Louis. I ran upstairs, grabbed a diaper and jammies, wrapped Dillon in a towel, ran downstairs, grabbed a pillow to cover him with, and went to the basement. By the time we got down under the stairs, the hail had already been beating at the house for a few minutes. We huddled until the hail stopped. I left him down there to go turn on the radar again, planning to turn up the volume and run back down, but it looked like the worst had passed already. Breathe. I went outside in the rain long enough to check out the hail. I brought in a few pieces and took pictures. They were already kind of melty, though. It was a warm day. It was bigger than golf ball but smaller than apple. You know those new apples that are "snack-sized" or something ridiculous like that. It was about that size. A plum size, I guess. There was one fatality and several injuries. A beer tent collapsed at the Rams game. But, the meteorologist said it was an absolute miracle that a storm with that kind of speed and rotation didn't touch down anywhere as it passed over the city. I like miracles. Despite all the bad storms, and even some property damage, we had last year, this was my first time going to the basement. I'm grateful for the experience because now I know exactly what to put in those emergency buckets I bought at home depot. If there had been a tornado, I might have been too late by the time I got Dillon's clothes out of the drawer and the pillow from the living room. You don't get much warning with these things. I was really scared this time. So scared that Dillon thinks the basement under the stairs is a special place to kneel down and pray.
