Remnants of Fay

This morning I suggested to Mr. Fixit that we should go out for lunch after my dental appointment. We drove into Clemson about 12:45; it was sprinkling rain. When we left the restaurant it was raining just a bit harder. We stopped to do an errand on the way home. While we were in the store, the rain began to pour. We got home about 2:00 pm. I was upstairs preparing to watch a DVD, and Mr. Fixit settled down for a movie on TV.

A few minutes later the phone rang. It was Jason calling from his job. He works about an hour and a half away from our house. He wanted to know if we knew that a tornado warning had been issued for Clemson and our town. Of course, we didn’t. We seldom watch the local channels. He said, “Get the cats and head for the downstairs bathroom.” We checked the local channels. Sure enough, a warning was on the screen saying that a tornado was imminent for Clemson and our town.

I spent a few minutes opening a few windows and shutting down the computer. I grabbed my purse and Mr. Fixit grabbed the box holding our “important” documents. The cats decided to ride out the storm in the middle level of the house. I certainly wasn’t going to risk life and limb carrying them downstairs. It was raining very hard. The warning was in effect until 3:30. I sat on the steps in the downstairs hall reading a book, and Mr. Fixit changed clothes to leave for work at 3:30.

A tornado did touch down in Clemson on the campus very near to Death Valley (the huge football stadium). There were trees down around the university and near downtown Clemson. The power is still out in parts of town. There have been no reported injuries. The university has a very good alert system.

I heard one report that a tornado may have hit somewhere in our little town, but we are so small that I guess no one cared to follow up on the report.

Right now the rain has stopped and the storms have moved into western North Carolina and another band is moving a little further east into NC. We aren’t out of the woods yet. There are two more bands of storms headed for us from Georgia. I think I’ll gather a few more things together and put them in a safer place.

I would like to take my new flat screen TV (it’s less than a month old), Mr. Fixit’s big TV, and the computer and its peripherals to safety, but if I unplug all that stuff, it would probably take us a long time to reconnect everything. I could be in for days of Spanish swearing and thinned lips. I think I’ll just put the CD’s with all the family pictures and my meds in a plastic bag for safekeeping and keep it with me if another storm is imminent.

Wish us luck!