So I don't know if you had heard, but central Texas had some really bad weather just a few days ago. Tornado warnings and severe thunderstorms, actually. Whateley and I ended up having a pretty scary experience.

The day began normally, the night before it rained, but otherwise it's a typical May. The air was really humid and warm though the sky had been filled with gray clouds. After running some errands, we jumped into a bookstore really quickly to look for a book, when the clerk told us there was a funnel cloud spotted not too far away, and that storm was headed straight for the store.

Well, we looked very quickly and got out of there quickly. While we drove, we noticed it started sprinkling, but nothing too bad. We got off the freeway at our normal exit and headed towards our house. The rain got a big harder, but it still wasn't bad. There was thunder and lightning lighting up the sky like mad, but we've seen it all before, so it wasn't fazing me... much. We did see lighting strike the ground not too far from us which ended in a bright spark. That may have been a transformer being hit. Then, we crossed a bridge and suddenly, the rain got very hard, very fast. Our headlights were barely illuminating the road ahead of us, and we just noticed a wall of water pouring from the skies... from left to right. It was really thick. We slowed to a crawl, as did the other cars around us, and I could see Whateley gripping the steering wheel tighter and tighter.

After about five minutes, the rain let up and the driving got a bit easier. But just a couple of minutes later, the rain began pouring again, and the wall of water was back... only this time from right to left.

We drove for a few more minutes, but it looked like the storm was not going to let up anytime soon, and the wall of water just kept pouring down like a flood from heaven. Finally, after we had to slow down to a snail's pace, Whateley decided to pull over and wait out the storm. There was only one place open, a Domino's, so we ran inside to seek shelter. They were nice enough to let us behind the counter and away from the giant glass windows.

The Dominos people were really cool. One guy had a fancy cell phone which he used to look up a website tracking the storm. It was big, but moving very fast. (We found out later that the southern portion of the storm was cycling, which was where the funnel cloud came from, but it never cycled enough to create a full-fledged tornado. And we were driving through that part of the storm when we had to pull over.) We watch the storm buffet our car for a while, and a half-hour later, the storm had died enough that we decided to head home. It was barely above sprinkling by that point.

Our house weathered the storm fine, and we left a bottle of weed killer out in the backyard, but even that came out fairly unscathed. A couple of more storms passed during the night, and thunder and lightning raged through the wee hours, but in the end, Whateley and I and our house is fine. And we won't have to water our lawn for at least a week now. =)

I had forgotten that May is thunderstorm season here. Perhaps one day I'll get used to them like I got used to earthquakes.

I realized that the first anniversary of our move to Austin came and went and I didn't blog about it. It was 4 days ago, on May 3, 2007, that we crossed into Austin and drove up to our new apartment and signed the lease. That trip was difficult but exciting, and I still remember most of it. And thinking back, it was the craziest thing we could do, but sitting at Whateley's desk in our new house... it was worth it!

I mean, there are still parts of me that wonder if we made the right decision, to uproot from all that we've known and away from all our family and move three states away to a city where we didn't know anyone other than the co-workers that moved here too. Since then, we've made some friends, moved up in the company, and we got our first house. And life is good. But there is a part of me that's scared that in the end, it is just me and Whateley, and all we've got is each other. I mean, our friends will help out if need be, but when it comes to family matters, we're it. What can I say, the paranoid part in me is fearful that Whateley will die or fall into a coma or get kidnapped and be a missing person forever.

If we can have it our way, we'll get Whateley's parents to retire over here. They're already looking at various out-of-state retirement options. I know I can entice Whateley's step-mom once we squirt out a kid, but that won't be for at least another year. What can I say, it'd be nice to have the option of dropping the kids off at the grandparents when we need a break.

Anyway, life in Austin is pretty damn good, and I'll go more into it at a later post. Right now, I'm just really tired and wanna go to bed.

We took another step into adulthood today... we got one of those box-o-wine.

I know!!!

The box-o-wine is one of those things you joke about cheap people pretending to be classy things, though it does make sense to keep wine in such a container to keep air from oxidizing the wine after you open it. Besides, you can just keep it in the fridge, and it's really easy to pour.

Whateley and I joke about this cuz his parents have been drinking the box-o-wine for years. He jokes that we're turning into his parents. I say that's not funny, it's scary. Though what would be funny would be if we ended up turning into my parents. I'm not sure if the whole immigrant experience translates across generations. After all, there are so many issues that I just won't have with my kids that my parents had with me. Being able to communicate fluently in the same language, for one. Though, I look at the state of kids' communications skills nowadays, and I fear for our nation's future.

We got a massive amount of groceries today from Costco. We sort of had the excuse while we were moving to eat out more frequently. We didn't want to move a bunch of food, so we were cutting back on groceries a lot before we moved. And then after the move, the house was a mess, nothing was organized, and we were exhausted cleaning and taking care of bills and accounts and whatnot. But now, we're getting settled, and the kitchen, for the most part, is usable, and all the appliances are functioning, except for the dishwasher, which we'll call the home warranty people for soon. So no more excuses, we're going to eat at home more. We're also trying to bring our lunch to work and not buy food from the office catering. There is this Chinese restaurant that they recently got to start coming, and they're actually coming during our shift instead of the earlier ones like many of the others. They're really good, but it's getting rather pricey since it costs $10 for a plate, even though it is a lot of food. I think we're going to limit ourselves to them only once a week. The sandwich girl is much cheaper, though it seems like the sandwiches are getting smaller. The pasta place, everyone agrees, is not worth it, even if they are the cheapest. It's kinda sad cuz the alfredo tastes like water and the marinara is okay but I've tasted better out of a jar. All we can think is, this place is a restaurant? They serve this stuff there?

Wow, this has turned into a really long ramble that says absolutely nothing.

Umm... I'm going to run my first pen-and-paper RPG! It's gonna be Star Trek, and I hope I don't suck!

We're just unpacking... slowly.

While I do have to say it's a thousand times better to live in a house rather than an apartment, there are still drawbacks. For one thing, an apartment is small, so when Whateley gets thirsty, he can go to the kitchen himself to get a drink. But in our house, since our computers and our room is upstairs and the kitchen is downstairs, when Whateley gets thirsty, he has to resort to complaining about his knee and/or making puppy dog faces, or just general trickery, to get me to get him a drink since it does require going up and down a flight of stairs as well as across several rooms.

We're also unpacking our books... and well, let's just say we've got a lot of books. Most of it's Whateley's actually. I wasn't much of a book buyer before. I was more into libraries. Them being free and all. Anyway, we've got two bookcases full of gaming books in our awesome gaming loft, and we put two bookcases in the guest bedroom, and they've already been filled. We have a fifth bookcase which we put in the spare room (it'll be a kid's room as soon as we squirt one out). So now we gotta decide whether or not to leave that spare room as storage/mostly empty so that once a kid arrives it won't take much work to turn it into a nursery, or to use it as a study or something until a kid arrives and then re-arrange everything.

But we've got a lot of books.