And I can’t because it is all freaking grey skies!! I hate Ohio! This impressive solar event and I have crap for skies. 😦 😦 😦 😦

*SIGH*

It better get clear so I can see some of this neat stuff. *SIGH* I wanna see planets…. I want to see planets with the moon. I wanna see cool stuff.

It’s bad enough I will pretty much not be able to see any of Venus’s transit in June, but now this???

/whine off

OK… now get this… I’m kind of tired this morning. So I was trying to work on the wouldbe novel. I wanted to finish up chapter six. Well I dozed off and the computer shut itself off. Joram plays with his leappad in his bedroom. Suddenly AIR RAID sirens are going off and I sit strait up sweating. *BLINK BLINK* Oh wait… it is Wed! *SIGH OF RELIEF* Oh crap! It’s noon already???? Joram needs to get dressed and eat and be at the bus stop in 20 minutes!!! *Surreal glance at clock. It is blazing that it is two hours earlier than I think it is.* 10ish??? WTF??? So I start panicking again. I lept up ran to my bedroom tv and yell at Joram “Get your leappad stuff and go to the basement!!!” Local fuzzy channels… only morning shows. CBS is amazingly enough about 68% clear. Miracle! Yet… morning crap. Nothing but morning crap. No crawl at the bottom of the screen or anything. Nothing saying “There’s a tornado, dive into your basement and quake in fear.” Nothing saying “Someone nuked the snot out of us, quake on your floor in your closet in fear.” And definately nothing saying “Hey no need to quake in fear, this is only a test.”

I try the radio while grabbing my laptop and cell phone off the bed. THey are playing some pop song. Quick scan through dials, and I do mean quick led me to believe nothing but music elsewhere. (ANd now I’ve lost my good channel for morning news when I wake up… which by the way said nothing when I woke up originally either.)

We’re running for the basement and I’m calling people on the cell. No answer. No answer. Also clueless and panicky. No answer. Clueless and panicky. Finally… someone with an answer. She happened to have the rare occasion to have the radio on like an hour ago and caught a passing by remark about some statewide test.

Thank goodness. She also said that had she not heard this random blip because it wasn’t during a news update or anything, she’d have also been panicking, grabbing her triplets, and heading for the basement. Her husband called them (probably wanting to make sure they were OK or something) so I told her to call me back if she wanted to and hung up. Told Joram we no longer had to quake in fear or anything and he could go back to playing. Meanwhile I’m still shaking and I call my poor clueless friends and let them know what’s going on.

Which led us all to ask the same question. What is wrong with the noon test that is scheduled for today anyway? And moreover, will there be a noon test as well? (Hey it sounds stupid but they’d do it here.) And of course several of my friends and I also wonder, just why do they feel the need to test this system here every week? All year round? I’ve lived here since 2000 and have yet to see a need for them. Now I’m sure if they stopped and the things broke bad stuff would happen… but you get the picture. I mean heck, we get massive wind storms, but not tornados.

So anyway, spent the next two hours trying to calm down. Scared the life out of me. And I’m sorry, I know people hear those here and think tornado but I hear them and always think “the bomb is falling.”

Now if they did play it on the news early this AM or something, great. Fine and dandy. But wouldn’t it be a good move to trust that not all of us are up at dawn and don’t turn on the tv before noon? I generally don’t turn on my tv until after 8:30 at the absolute earliest. Usually later. usually not till something like 10 or 12. Heck yesterday I didn’t turn it on till 4!! But hello, everyone will turn on the tv or radio as soon as they hear loud fricking sirens!!! So shouldn’t they scrawl something on the screen? “This is just a test.”

Oh yeah and they do not warn new comers about the weekly test here. I was in downtown near the mall the first time I heard it go off. I went screaming into the nearest store asking “Do you have the radio on? Are we going to die or what?” Imagine how stupid I felt when they told me it was a weekly test. Well I’m sorry, grew up in DC and then lived on military bases. THey never test those things and so if you hear one it generally means death and apocolyptic problems. ROFL Freaked my ex-marine husband too. Military instinct kicked right in until he realized he was no longer military and hello… we live in Ohio and like anyone cares enough to attack us!!

I STILL feel all out of sorts today. And it’s like 12 hours later… Probably the surreal panicky and stuff. That sudden rush of endorphines and everything else.

So, no further writing in book. No graphics playing. Nothing. except for playing with star chart, chatting, trying to calm down, and well… random brain deadedness.