I just celebrated my 27th birthday on March 28th and I must say, it was probably my best birthday in recent history. First, I gave myself the gift of a clean house. Then that afternoon my mom, Art, and I took the girls to the carnival they have annually behind Sierra Vista Mall. You realize as you get older that the thing that makes you the most happy is seeing your kids happy and Keira just loves rides. She is the ultimate thrill seeker. She rode the ferris wheel with Grandma, two crazy spinning rides with me, and went down a gigantic wavy slide with Art three times. When I was on the Tornado spinning ride with Keira, the ride reached the top and got spinning fast and she laughed whole heartedly and shouted, "This is even better than I imagined!" That made my day. :)
Then we went to one of my favorite restaurants for dinner, Plaza Ventana, and had a delicious meal. Afterward, we took the girls home and Grandma watched them while Art and I went to see the new Oz movie. When we got home, the girls were fast asleep. It was so nice to come home to a peaceful clean house. I think what made this birthday so special was that I didn't try to invite friends and become disappointed when no one bothered to show up. It was a beautiful day, the girls were both happy and well behaved, and I just enjoyed fun time with my family and that's the most important thing to me.
I had watched the original Wizard of Oz a few times last week in preparation for seeing the new Oz movie. I think The Wizard of Oz is the best movie of all time. Even Keira and Liana love it. I have never seen Liana be interested in what's on TV until I put on The Wizard of Oz for her. She was absolutely fixated on it. I did have high hopes for the new Oz movie (which is a prequel to the old Wizard of Oz) but I knew it wouldn't compare in awesomeness just because nothing compares in awesomeness to the original Wizard of Oz. It was a decent movie, but we both thought it was too long. Anyway, my point is not to give a movie review, but watching all these tornadoes in the movies this week and riding the Tornado ride reminded me of the time I was in a tornado many years ago...
It was about 15 years ago... I must have been around 12 years old or so (my mom says it was right when we moved in that house which would make me 8 years old, but I could swear I was older than that). It was probably in early spring. The weather was calm that day, but in the afternoon we saw a storm start to come in from the West. Black clouds and pouring rain. Our house was a big two-story home in the country, nothing but crops on every side. My mom and I were sitting on her bed looking out the back sliding glass door to the balcony watching the storm clouds get closer. The wind picked up quickly and was blowing harder than we had ever seen before and suddenly we see a tornado form from the clouds and touch town maybe a quarter mile from our house. There was a farm worker on a tractor out plowing the field and he turned his tractor around and was driving away as quickly as he could, but the tornado was getting closer so he actually got off the tractor and started running toward the street.
My mom and I stood at the sliding glass door and watched the tornado coming straight toward our house in complete awe... like complete dummies. It hit our house directly and the glass on the door bent inward. It was completely curved. Then water started shooting though the bottom of every door and window on the West side of our house about 6 feet in the air. We scrambled to grab towels to stuff into the cracks. After the tornado passed, we saw that our above-ground pool which had been mostly empty in the back yard, had been tossed completely out of our backyard.
Thankfully any tornado that touches down in California is not any more devastating than this one was, because we would have been in a world of trouble standing there by those glass windows. They probably would have all shattered on us. I think the proper tornado protocol is to crack the windows and get to a room in the center of the house with no outside walls or windows, but we didn't know that back then. So, just in case you were wondering, we weren't transported to Oz, nor did we get to meet the wizard... but it definitely gave us a story worth telling.
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