Unfortunately, a house did not fall on that irritating kid in my calligraphy class

So yes, for those of you who don't watch/read the news, a tornado did hit Iowa City last night, taking out a Dairy Queen, a Happy Joe's Pizza, and the roofs of several buildings including St. Patrick's Catholic Church.

I, fortunately, was in Coralville at the time, watching Big Trouble in Little China with friends and completely ignoring the situation. We heard the hail and the tornado sirens, but as we were in a basement apartment, we just turned up the volume and figured we'd hear the freight-train sound of the tornado if it got close. It didn't, fortunately. Instead it hit downtown Iowa City, knocking out power to a good chunk of the area and providing an occasion for drunken undergraduates to wander around and get in the way of emergency workers and National Guard personnel working to contain a gas leak downtown.

My apartment survived unscathed; fortunately I had gone home before going out to close the windows. The shed behind the building is listing pretty severely to the right, and down the hill you can see people working to close the giant hole in the Menards roof. Right now the biggest problems, though, seem to be that people are rubbernecking like idiots, making traffic kind of a pain. I'm solving that by hiding out in the library, and once I'm done here I'll take the roundabout way home.

So that's the story of the tornado. Unlike many of my friends, I did not see any funnel clouds, hear a noise like a train, or feel my ears pop from pressure. But my house and myself survived without damage, and so I think I'll just be grateful and go do some homework.