I swear, I should really have gone into meteorology and been a storm chaser.

Today, I was caught in the teeth of the first wave of storms, as a Tornado Warning was issued for northern Cook County. I was driving home, through Glenview...it was actually a really beautiful sight driving by the giant prairie that used to be Glenview Naval Air Station, and looking out to my right seeing the giant black storm coming. I actually thought to myself how different and unusual it looked.

Once I got into downtown Glenview, it was pretty much nighttime out, and the rain started coming down hard. I got out of Glenview and was heading into Morton Grove when I decided, well, I better turn off the iPod and turn on WBBM and see what was happening, if anything. Right when I turned the radio on, they talked about the Tornado Warning for northern Cook, and that a tornado had been confirmed over Park Ridge. I thought, wait a minute, I'm only a couple of miles away from there. They then said Morton Grove was next in line, and I thought, well, this is great.

But I pressed on, fully aware of what was going on around me. It was only when I couldn't see the cars behind me anymore and could barely see those in front of me that I decided, OK, it's time to pull over and prepare to get out of this car and somewhere safer. I slapped on the hazards, and traffic had pretty much stopped at this point. I looked to my right and pulled into a restaurant's parking lot. As I did so, hail began to pelt the car. I thought, great...here we go. For those who don't know, hail often CAN be a precursor to a tornado. The winds had also severely kicked it up a notch. I ran into the restaurant, where everyone was eating, peacefully, fully naive and unaware of the situation outside, other than "Wow, it's really coming down out there."

Now feeling much safer (though standing by the glass doors, watching the storm outside), I thought to myself, see, this is why idiots die in tornadoes. Because they sit there and continue to eat dinner when it's clearly really bad outside. And boy, it was bad. I haven't seen wind and rain like this, I venture to say, in my life.

Yet, for as hard as the wind blew, I didn't see a ton of damage on the rest of the ride home. Tons and tons of standing water, but only some garbage cans blown down and a couple branches. But nothing too terrible.

So why should I have been a storm chaser? I got a rush out of it, and it amazed me. And continues to do so. The awesome power, the sheer beauty of the pre-storm and post-storm clouds and sky, the lightning I saw, and the insane amount of water that a giant cloud can drop are all just so intriguing.

At any rate, that was my eventful ride home. They said that the tornado sirens had not blown in the city of Chicago since the infamous 1959 White Sox pennant win, when they blew the sirens off to celebrate the victory, late at night, and scared the shit out of a bunch of non-baseball fans who didn't know what was going on and thought a Soviet nuke was on its way. My mom even said she doesn't remember ever hearing those sirens, even when the tornado ripped through Oak Lawn in 1967 and continued on its path through the south edge of the city, becoming the only tornado to touch down in the city of Chicago's history (I believe).

So...otherwise, have a great weekend. :) Hopefully much more dry than this evening.