After a weekend of good J-Fed, troublemaking J-Fed reared his little head. But we had a good run while it lasted. It started Sunday night after his three-day stretch of bravado. I hadn’t heard hide nor hair of him for hours. Then the lightning crashed and the thunder rolled. What put an end to this interlude was a nasty storm chock full of hail, tornado warnings, wind and rain.
It all began with a call.
“Turn on the news. There’s a tornado watch. You need to keep your eye on the radar. It may get nasty. They just pre-empted Dateline,” he informed me.
I clicked on Dateline and watched the warning scroll across the bottom of the screen. I was overcome with an icky feeling in my stomach. I wasn’t sure if it was the storm watch or the fact that J-Fed was checking out the segment on some man that had his wife whacked. Was he sending me some subliminal message? Mmmmm, I doubted it, but I was impressed that J-Fed actually watched something besides YouTube in his spare time.
As I looked out the window, I realized there was some gravity to his concerns. The sky did look quite ominous and after seeing how bad Kansas just got plummeted, the threat of a tornado did leave me feeling a bit uneasy to say the least. Obviously, it was enough to make J-Fed concerned.
“Do you know where you’re supposed to go?” he asked me.
“Yes, I go into my closet,” I told him. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. Oh wait, I am home. Grrrrrrr.
“No, you got into my closet,” he snapped back. Hey J-Fed, your closet is my closet now. I hate to break it to you buddy, but I could probably fit one and a half dogs in “my” closet. Obviously, if I’m going to find a safe haven for one adult, two kids and two dogs, it’s not going to be in there.
“Yes, J-Fed. By my closet, I meant your old closet,” I reassured him.
“Okay. Now when you go in there, throw all the blankets and clothes on top of you all to protect you,” he said frantically. In an instant, I went from concerned to concerned that the Fedster was trying to get me all stirred up from his humble abode.
Listen Chicken Little. I get it, the sky is falling. However, if you’re so concerned about our well-being, why don’t you hop in your truck, drive the three minutes it takes to get over here and show that you really mean well? Then we can all do a mock tornado drill together and sing You Are My Sunshine while hiding under our makeshift fort.
Nah, instead you’d prefer to play weatherman from the comfort of your own apartment while I figure out a way to squeeze one adult, two kids and two dogs in “your” closet. I envisioned the puppet master lying on his couch grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of having gotten me twisted over a possible twister. I tried not to growl at the phone.
“Great J-Fed. I’m looking at the sky and now you have me worried. It looks bad out there,” I told him.
“Oh, you’ll be fine. Stop sweating it,” And with that Chicken Little hung up the phone and went back to watching Dateline.
As I looked outside in the direction of J-Fed’s apartment, I noticed what may have been a small funnel cloud forming over his place. I closed the blinds and smiled as I realized that there wasn’t a closet in his humble abode that was big enough to fit Chicken Not So Little.
Jerk!