Tornado sirens.

The other week I got woken up like an hour before I was ready to get up, by tornado sirens.

I went around and looked out my windows and saw nothing but unexceptional rain, and then I groggily got back into bed, but then I thought of checking my phone, and there it was, a warning to get away from windows and onto the lowest floor of your house and into a basement if possible.

So, I ran around, got my wallet, got my laptop, and headed out the front door within 3 minutes, and I popped down into the basement of the main house where we have the communal washer and dryer, to wait there until the time when the phone warning said the all-clear was.

And, I sat there and realized I should have my vital documents ready to pick up and bring downstairs with me, just like I could grab my laptop out of my closet by the front door.

I also tried to do my daily DuoLingo lessons, but it said I was "Offline" -- a clear falsehood, since all the while I was also texting people while I was in the basement.  

They must have something built into the app, to keep you from using it and getting distracted while you have a severe weather warning up on your phone!

That would probably be bad for their image, to have someone doing their daily language lessons and ignoring alerts and then getting killed, or using up all the power on their phone while a blizzard is happening or whatnot and the power goes out.

My biggest thing, though, was, that I just need to take this massive shit, but I couldn't since I had to be in the basement.

Finally after like thirty minutes I went back upstairs and into my cottage again, and then I beelined directly to the bathroom and birthed this huge pile of blackish well-formed shit directly into the bowl, from the black-beans-and-rice that had been my main meal the previous day (and also maybe some dark green from a kale salad contributed to that color, too).