Not Quite The Cleaning Lady

last thursday i was exhausted! i had spent the week almost constantly congested, due to allergies. i was actually looking forward to taking yoga at 6:30 am because it was the one time during the day that i could breathe. 90 minutes of lung-filling air and then, boom, back to being a mouth breather. at night it was almost impossible to sleep because my eyes were itchy, my throat was itchy, my nose was itchy AND blocked. i would drift off to some kind of sleep and automatically close my mouth. this would lead to self-suffocation and my jerking back to a crabby wakeful state. and by thursday, as i said, i was exhausted. i spent the day telling myself that i just needed to get to 5pm, then i could go home, eat something and then pass out.

it was a struggle but i made it. i made it and dragged myself to the subway. the train rolled into my stop and i stepped out to take the stairs to open air. i noticed puddles of water and thought - oh, thank goodness i missed the rain. it must have been a quick storm because it wasn't raining when i left work and it isn't raining now. oh well, lucked out.

then i stepped into my apartment and saw this:



this being windows wide open with the curtain twisted and billowing outside. this being the window screens on the floor and on the couch. this being almost everything that had been on the window sill now being on the ground and some of those things were broken into small fragments. i screamed inside my head, "oh my gosh, we've been robbed! but who would come all the way up to the fifth floor and break in through the windows and why would they break stuff and why did they have to leave the window screen on the couch - that's just rude." with all the windows open without screens, the living room seemed strangely open and airy and everything was eerily quiet. no sounds were coming from outside and i couldn't hear hidef, who is usually home when i get home. i made my way to the office and came face to face with this:


that's the back wall of the office and it looked as though the screen hit the wall, splattered mud all over the place the ground and then landed on the ground. yep, another wide open window. it was then that i noticed the water. everywhere - on the floor, the desk and the computer on the desk. i went back to the living room and saw that there was water on the furniture, the floors and the ceiling.

i called hidef and he told me he had just stepped out for a second and a storm had hit. it was pretty loud, he said. well, i answered, this apartment looks crazy, i don't know what happened. i hung up and surveyed the damage. i started wiping things down but decided i needed paper towels to completely dry off. i grabbed a bag and went out to walk up the block. whoa! what happened to the block? there were tree branches all over the place and people outside their yards, sweeping and looking shell shocked. i picked up the paper towels and bumped into a neighbour on my way back. his windows had been shattered by the wind. so he not only had a mess but he now also had no window. what had happened?

while i was cleaning up, hidef got back to tell me that the storm had caused major havoc in the neighbourhood. storm? turns out that we kinda got hit by a tornado. man! and i missed the moment. i could have clicked my heels and made a wish for something. like world peace. or sanity. or really good chocolate.