Thursday, April 3, 2025

This is the fourteenth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Last night was a very big thunderstorm, that got upgraded to a tornado warning. This has happened before in our area, though it's never gotten to the point of needing to evacuate or anything. We don't have a storm cellar or basement or anything in our house, just a cramped crawl space that's full of dust and dead mice. Which are better than alive mice, let me tell you.

We were alerted to the situation by the power going out, which is normally a quiet affair but not in our situation. Above our bed are two lamps which have a remote control, so when the power goes out and back on again, they turn on, and since it happened in rapid succession, I thought one of the kids was doing an April Fool's prank a day late. What gave it away was my standing desk, which uses a motor to raise and lower, also beeps when the power is disconnected. So that got us right awake. Everything's probably fine here, I'm sure some trees went down somewhere but no damage to anything important.

In other news, LegendFiction has announced it's newest short story contest, this one themed around Arthurian legends. I came up with a Frontier Flora story (of course) centered around two "archaeologists" raiding the tomb of a knight of the round table in 18XX Avalon to find clues to the location of the seeds of a legendary Florabeast that would help them fight off the Napoleonic empire that's taken over most of Europa. It sounded like fun at first, but ultimately I think it would just be more Frontier Flora and not enough King Arthur. After not getting chosen for the last contest (which I'm actually grateful for, that left room for more of the younger writers in the group to have a chance to shine), I've decided to sit out of the short story game for a while. For contests, anyway. I still have several things planned to work on while doing audio production, even before beginning work on Counterbalance. Which is still a thing, and there might be more about it tomorrow.

Have you ever had to evacuate because of weather or disasters?