Friday night after work we flew out to Florida to visit family for Christmas. Mr. & Mrs. G live on farmland in central Florida, in a little town called Webster which is about an hour away from anything "civilized." We had a pretty good time from Friday night all the way up until Monday morning, when it started to drizzle. Drizzle turned into heavier rain, but we assumed that it wouldn't get any worse and decided to start cooking Christmas lunch. Just at the point where everyone was getting really hungry, the power flickered and went off, along with the oven which contained a partially cooked turkey. No problem, right? We waited about an hour and when the power didn't come back on we decided just to pack everything into the trunk and take it to the grandparents' house to finish cooking.

It took almost half an hour but we finally got everything packed away: veggies, potatoes, turkey, pie, and two puppies which were being potty trained and couldn't be left inside for the afternoon. We loaded up into the car and started the half hour trek to the retirement community.

Along the way we noticed various points of interest, such as places where carports were no longer technically covering cars so much as they were covering parts of trees and the street, as well as some manufactured homes that had been partially trashed by the wind and rain. "Huh" we all remarked. "The storm didn't seem THAT bad!" We continued driving, rubbernecking and even taking pictures, and at one point having to stop for emergency crews where an entire tree had fallen across the road. "Isn't this an adventure?! Look at that tree and all those county people with chainsaws! Ha ha! Oh no, look at that poor guy's boat, I hope he had insurance!"

No one seemed hurt and there didn't seem to be THAT much property damage, after all, I guess now if you want to build a permanent style structure in Florida now it needs to be built to hurricane-proof specifications, so perhaps that's why we didn't really get the grasp of how bad the damage to central Florida actually was.

After an exciting and eventful drive we finally arrived at the retirement community, which is a cluster of nice semi-permanant mobile homes which had been decorated sassily for Christmas, or I guess at least it had been decorated sassily BEFORE the storm. When we got there it was really sort of sad looking with decorations all over the place and broken reindeer laying about making obstacles in the road. It was there we found out that his grandparents and their dog had spent the last half hour hiding in their tiny trailer bathroom because apparently that storm we'd been riding through turned out to be a path of destruction left by tornados. Yes! We'd been riding around in the tornado warning zone in a little plastic Suzuki Forenza.

So that's how I ended up spending Christmas day crammed into a tiny mobile home with ten people and three dogs during a tornado outbreak, playing Uno while the local news played endlessly in the background.

According to CNN only one person in Florida was "seriously" hurt, but his or her condition is not "critical," whatever the hell that means. I wish the newscasters would just say that someone suffered from a broken pelvis or something rather than using vague terms which really mean nothing. Shelters were constructed, Christmas dinner was served to the people whose homes were flooded, and repairs are already underway.

I noticed that after the storm, my in-laws DID stop making broad hints about how nice central Florida is, and there were no more questions about how we enjoyed the long car trips, or comments about how easy it would be to work from home as a web designer or in a local law office as a legal secretary. At least they're more subtle than my dad, who likes to talk about how easy it would be to add a suite to the back of his house and how the nice middle eastern men where he works think multi-generational households are the only way to live. I think we're going to have to put both sides of the family into a giant bidding war, where we'll eventually go with the people who agree to do our ironing and buy us groceries and booze.

At least, that's how I imagine it.

So to those of you who like to bitch about Cleveland weather, at least you didn't have tornados. Kind of makes forty degree sleet seem kind of nice, doesn't it? Don't get me wrong, we had a great time in Florida, but it's good to be home, in our nice intact apartment building where the roof is still attached.