Sorry all for the late post. It’s been a VERY interesting (in the Chinese sense) weekend at Casa Del The Dude. First, the DSL decided to give up the ghost, which has taken up far more time than necessary this weekend to recover (several hours on the phone with lovely support folks in the Phillipines, purchasing new hardware, etc.). Second, The Dude is on call for his company this weekend, which of course has direct bearing on why the first item matters. Third, a major project is reaching a milestone next week for his company, which is why the first two matter even more. All that alone would make for big fun, but then Mother Nature had to go and throw her hat in the ring. Yesterday, we ran errands that started on the west side of the Metro, and then continued to run errands that (unbeknownst to us) kept us only 15 minutes in front of a tornado dropping hook echo the entire way home. We were only trying to beat the rain, fully aware that the sky looked dark behind us, but it wasn’t until we pulled on an offramp a few miles from home that we realized something was seriously amiss. As we pulled on the offramp, there came the lovely chorus of warning sirens rising over the sound of tires on the road, and which obviously put us in the best of moods. A few minutes of navigating side streets later and everyone was camped out in the basement, listening to the weatherman report the storm at a level of detail that sounded more like a countdown than a weather report, as the location of the highest danger was marching cross-street by cross-street down a highway a fraction of a mile away. Fortunately, there was no property damage or loss of life here, although everyone got some gray hair. Attila and Genghis came through it like troopers, both a little confused why they had to be in the basement when it was obviously bedtime, and why Mom and Dad seemed so nervous. Usually this area has a few of these exercises a year, but for some reason this one seemed a little more intense- perhaps the fact that we had just been driving through every neighborhood and on every road mentioned in the news report had something to do with it, or perhaps it was because of Genghis’s young age. Fall and Winter can’t come soon enough. 😉 100 Quatloos to the first person to correctly identify the origin (title and artist) of the song lyrics quoted on the title line without looking it up (i.e. cheating).