The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

Last week was a really bad week for me. A really, really bad week. It started with a fight I never care to relive, then my truck got broken into—again—breaking the back lock on the liftgate and making off with a wallet. And it ended with a cancer biopsy.

By Friday, I was done. I managed to get into one more fight, this time with my boss, and I headed home for the weekend with specifically nothing planned, save one trip to the junkyard to try to find a replacement latch for my truck.

I yawned and stretched during the 8 o'clock hour that night and headed to bed. I was tired and wanted to sleep and forget about everything that's been plaguing me. And apparently I slept through an effing tornado, although I didn't know it at the time.

It wasn't until Saturday afternoon when I found out (after I had visited the junkyard. The only matching truck they had had been on fire and everything from the back bumper to the steering wheel had melted together. Sure the back latch was still on it, if you were up for scraping the rust off, and the gasoline smell, and the bad juju that comes with a vehicle of death.) I bored of the TiVo and turned on live TV for the first time ever. I settled for an episode of Cops on Fox (hey, those shows never fail to make my situation look a little brighter.) Instead I got Ken Cook and his doppler radar. "If you're in this pink zone right here," he gestured. "You need to take cover now."

"That's us," Boyfriend spoke up. "We live right above the A in Atlanta," he said, pointing to the map on the screen. As if God had heard, the sky turned green and sheets of hail began to fall.

"It looks like it's raining cereal!" I exclaimed, never having been by a window during a hail storm before. Behind me I heard the TV say marble-sized hail and instantly decided that was a better description than my Trix imagery. "Wait," I said, thinking again. "Doesn't hail come right before a tornado?"

"There's no way a tornado could land in the city," Boyfriend responded. "With all the tall buildings, there's no space for it to go vertical." I felt safer after he said that. I always felt that storms in the city were more violent than the ones I remember in the suburbs where I grew up. Whereas in the suburbs lightning would flash in the distance and you could always count between thunderclaps to see how far away it was, the lightning in the city had always felt right above me, and the thunderclaps were always immediate. After 10 minutes of deafening hail crashing against the apartment, the storm passed. Tornado averted. "See," Boyfriend teased. "Told you. It'll never happen in the city."

That was the exact moment when Ken Cook talked about the first ever tornado that touched down the previous night in downtown Atlanta. Ever. "A path of destruction 200 yards wide from the CNN Center to Cabbagetown," he detailed. I looked wide-eyed at Boyfriend. The CNN Center is no more than two miles from me, and Cabbagetown lies about three streets over. The TV showed devastating damage: windows were blown out of the Westin, cab drivers reported the 139 mph winds blowing the glass out of their cars. Hell, we were in a state of emergency and I had no idea. I slept through it all.

This is becoming a little concerning. And P.S. still haven't taken care of that renter's insurance thing.