Back in Kansas we have all the weather. There have been ice storms, thunderstorms, floods and tornadoes that have done massive damage in Manhattan over the past three years. There is a saying that if you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes. Actually I have heard that saying in many places, but it is certainly true in Kansas. I have seen a calm, sunny, sixty-five degree, mid-morning turn into a blustery, cold, snowy, winter afternoon. Conversely, I have seen a wind blowing, bitterly cold morning turn into a sunny, snow melting sixty-five degree beauty in the middle of January.
The odd thing is New York actually has similar weather being that it is somewhat humid and hot in the summer, and relatively cold and snowy in the winter. But the one thing I expected to leave in Kansas were the tornadoes.
Lo and Behold Jenn and I were riding the bus home and it went from cloudy and non-threatening to dark and a heavy downpour in a matter of minutes. Lightning strikes completed the sudden change and the storm made me feel right at home. The only difference was we were riding a bus rather than driving our own car and I had a bag with contents that couldn’t get wet. I looked out the window to see if I could tell which way the storm was going and if we were going to get a break because the downpour would have ruined the computer, and I had nothing to protect it. Unfortunately I couldn't get a gauge on the storm, but I saw what I thought was a funnel cloud. I pointed it out to Jenn and she thought it could be as well, but we figured our Kansas minds might be deceiving us.
There was also a dilemma at our apartment. It doesn't have air conditioning so I leave the windows open during the day in order to keep air flowing through. I feel comfortable doing this because it is on the second floor and there is absolutely no possibility of anyone getting up there that doesn't belong unless they rappelled from a helicopter. But I feared that anything near the windows would be soaked, and this included electrical outlets.
I didn’t concern myself with fearing a tornado, since there wouldn’t be much we could do anyway; so I focused on what we should do with our current situation. Thankfully our stop is near the end of the line where the bus turns around and begins the route going the opposite direction. Because of this, we decided to ride it out and hope it stopped raining enough for us to make it home without getting the computer bag wet. We figured this would get us an extra twenty minutes.
We rode through the storm with no sign of let up. As we turned the corner to our street it was still pouring with two blocks to go. Two stoplights separated us between our stop and both turned red, buying us a little more time. When our bus pulled over to let us out, we hopped off the bus and the rain was almost non-existent. I believed us to be in the eye of the storm and I thanked our luck. Once we made it home, the torrential rains began again, but our computer equipment and all of my notebooks were safe and dry. And somehow the rain stayed out of our apartment, which is a small miracle in itself.
The next day I saw the headline in a newspaper announcing a tornado had ripped through Brooklyn killing one, uprooting many trees and damaging property along the way. I thought, "Wow, there really was a tornado and we were worried about our computer!"
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Several days later, as we were leaving our apartment, it began to rain. We didn't learn from the last storm and buy an umbrella, so we had to learn the hard way about rain in the big city. Normally rain is not a big deal because we can go from building to car in a hurry, but not here.
I had my waterproof jacket with me so I was able to drape it over my computer bag, but the rest of me was getting soaked. By the time I rode with Jenn and said goodbye to her at school, it was raining really hard. I walked several blocks and hopped on a bus toward the library.
When I got off the bus, I was two blocks from the library, and it was still coming down heavily. As I was walking to the library from the bus stop, I waited for a light to turn green so I could cross the street. Before this could happen, I felt something smack me in the back of the head. A small man in a suit was darting in and out of pedestrian traffic, while bumping others with an umbrella that was larger than the rest. He didn't care, he was dry and he had the biggest umbrella. My first thought was to get mad because this inconsiderate bastard was in such a hurry that he was literally forcing his large umbrella down the road, and not even trying to apologize about it.
Then I laughed realizing that he had to have an umbrella that big to keep his ego dry. And suddenly I felt better about my own situation, and vowed to buy the biggest umbrella I could find that afternoon.
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Since I didn’t have any pictures for this post, I thought I would add one we took at dusk. Jenn and I went down to the trail by the bay to read while the sun went down. This is the Verrazano Bridge that runs between Brooklyn and Staten Island.
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