Everything has gone crazy. My sister’s gone off to the Carribean to elope, my old roomie is going off to Cairo for a year and a half in two weeks, New Orleans has been flattened by what appears to be a giant, pissed off water monster. I was bored at work Monday morning, so instead of browsing blogs endlessly, I followed up on Little Ms. Katrina. She was a wee little CAT1 when she hit Florida a few days ago, but apparently there is something in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico that acts as super-steroid-turbo-boosters for baby hurricanes. They are lucky that she weakened a bit and did not hit in her full blown CAT5 fury, but nevertheless, the good old town and like half of Mississippi has been flattened. I’m sad I didn’t get a chance to see NOLA before; now all’s left are floating tombstones and big balls of floating fire ants:

“Red imported fire ants (RIFA) are extremely resilient and have adaptations to contend with both flooding and drought conditions. If the ants sense increased water levels in their nests, they will come together and form a huge ball or raft that is able to float on the water, with the workers on the outside and the queen inside. Once the ball hits a tree or other stationary object, the ants swarm onto it and wait for the water levels to recede. To contend with drought conditions, their nest structure includes a network of underground foraging tunnels and tunnels that extend down to the water table.”

I know people that are new to Kansas freak about tornadoes, and certainly I freaked out about tornadoes when I was little. I used to cower under a blanket (because it afforded that much more protection) in the southwest corner of our basement, and cry if my dad refused to go downstairs. Since I’ve grown up, though, I’ve realized that as far as severe weather goes, we Kansans are not in a bad way. Tornadoes are pretty easy to avoid, as long as you have access to a basement or even a bathroom with no windows, and don’t live in or near a trailer park (tornado magnet). Sure, they’re all windy and angry and everything, but they touch down for maybe five minutes max and you can see them coming. Blow a few cows around, cut some power lines, maybe smash a couple of idiot X-treme! storm-chasers, then it’s done. Plus, the sky takes on this really cool greenish gold tinge right before a storm.

Compare tornadoes, then, to other severe weather. Hurricanes are BAD. They are extremely angry and, though mildly predictable, sometimes pull stunts like this last one (running around the Gulf of Mexico and powering up majorly). Also, fire ant balls? Jesus, forget that. I’m sure it would be very nice to live on a sunny beachfront property, and be able to swim and surf and lay out in your own backyard - but not at the price of having your house smashed to bits and then, on top of that, be swarmed with giant floating balls of stingy death. Ugh. Also, hurricanes often summon fleets of tornado friends to assist them in the noble cause of smashing people. Proverbial cherry on top.

And earthquakes? Never having been in an earthquake, I don’t really know, but I don’t like the sound of them. What are you supposed to do? Yeah, stand in the doorway, but from what I hear, it’s not as foolproof a charm as going to the basement or not living in a trailer park. Plus I don’t know about dealing with big chunks of falling plaster and shattering glass and whatnot. Earthquakes have a much larger area of effect range than tornadoes, hence I’m guessing they are harder to deal with. Supposedly Kansas isn’t totally free from the risk of an earthquake; my roomie informs me that there is a deep fault line under Missouri or something that, should it quake, would be the Ultimate Quaking Devastator. But if that happens, North America would be split apart and half would fall in the ocean anyways, so we’d take all the coastal states down with us. Ha.

Volcanoes? I’m not even going to go into how stupid one would have to be to voluntarily live on the side of a giant lava spewing rock of DEATH.

So Kansas isn’t that bad, really. Sure, we have lots of cows and boring driving scenery instead of access to a beautiful, majestic ocean. But no fire ant balls, no danger of being totally annihilated by beefed-up hurricanes. And that I wouldn’t trade for any amount of high-property value shoreline.

p.s. - Here’s a link to the Red Cross - I believe their site is getting hammered now with traffic (a good thing, really!), but it should be back up soon for donations to hurricane victims.