Remember the Tornado Party when we had to take cover?

Saturday, September 17th was interesting to say the least. We were throwing a small get together at my house to watch the USC/NU game on ABC. The game was not what I liked to see. I was hoping that NU might build off some sort of offensive success early in the game and compete to win, but what we were treated with was run after run that only exposed how my Nebraska team still needs a lot of help on the offensive line and a lot of help in the defensive secondary, but that's not what this story is about.

One of the guests mentioned to me that the thunderheads developing outside to the east were really tall, so tall that they no longer were in our atmosphere, but in the stratosphere...

I kind of know what she meant, but not really. But hey, the clouds did indeed look extremely tall, so I went with it and even started telling people at the party, "You should see the thunderhead clouds forming outside. They're so tall that they're no longer in our atmosphere..."

A little after halftime, the weather started to get a little scary. Thunder started booming and some rain started. On the TV, the weather guy broke in with a split screen to mention that some possible tornado clouds had been spotted in our area... and were headed right towards us. At this point, it was decided that we should probably move downstairs to some more safety.

One of my wife's co-worker's joked, "Oh this is great! If only I had stayed at home, I'd be well clear of this storm. Out west, we're in the middle of it."

Another one quipped, "Yeah, for years, we'll be going 'Hey, remember when we went to Laura's tornado party and had to take cover in the basement?'"

Our neighbor was next door looking after her baby while her kids were downstairs with the rest of us. Laura suggested that we should go next door and go get her, so she could be in the basement with us since our neighbor's basement was unfinished and she was upstairs with the baby, not exactly the safest place. Laura called her up and headed over to her house to help her come over. A few minutes later, I get a call that I think is from Laura.

I hear nothing but wind and then I hear, "Hello?..."

I ask, "I'm here... "

"HellO?"

"Yes!"

"Bob?"

"Yes! Talk to me!"

"Oh sorry, this is Jessica (my neighbor down the street). I was just letting you guys know that you should get everyone in the basement."

"They are," I replied.

"Good. Because there is a funnel cloud that is hanging over my house. It keeps going up and down, but it hasn't touched ground yet."

I panic and sprint upstairs and throw open the door. I step outside and there in what seems to be the middle of the road right at about rooftop height, is a fairly large, white funnel cloud. It wasn't exactly the text book one that you would expect from a spinning cloud, but it was close enough for me! I look over to my left and see my neighbor and her baby. I usher them inside the house. I look the funnel cloud again and over to my left again and see Laura fiddling with the neighbor's door. She's carrying a dog carrier that must have their dog, Snoopy, in it. I yell, "Hurry up!"

She's moving slow.

I yell louder, "HURRY UP!"

She looks at me a little confused. I point behind her. Laura turns around, glances at the funnel cloud and starts hightailing at a much faster pace towards our house. I guess it's nothing like a storm right in front of you to get people moving...

We run inside. I close the door and (for some odd reason) lock the deadbolt (as if that would stop the storm). We run downstairs. I take a quick inventory of the people down there. Everyone seems accounted for. I decide to get the cats rounded up.

The storeroom has a hole in the wall for the cats to jump through to get to the food and their litter. I quickly block the hole with a large box and throw other heavy items behind it. I walk out of the storeroom and grab the two cats that were down there, Moe and Susie. I think Murphy (our other cat) is still upstairs.

I yell to Laura, "I'm going to get Murphy! The tornado's outside! (for some reason I yell this as it wasn't a tornado yet).

I start upstairs and Julia asks, "Tornado? Where?" She starts mounting the stairs to follow me! "I want to see!" she exclaims excitedly. One of Laura's co-workers quickly grabs Julia and takes her back downstairs telling her "we're going to have some fun!"

I rush upstairs and head towards the bedroom. I look in the bedroom and don’t find her. I run out back into the living room and look behind the couch. There she is. I pull the couch out and grab her. Murphy protests with some “rororr” sounds. She starts to thrash a little bit and giving her tendency to scratch me with her hind legs, I hold her back feet with my free hand while running down the stairs. Her heart is racing as we pass by the people downstairs. She protests again and I feel something warm on my chest.

I drop her in the storeroom and close the door behind me. I examine my shirt. It’s wet in a spot. So are my shorts. Murphy has peed on me!

This happened one other time when we were just getting ready to show our house to some people who were going to buy our house. They had brought their parents to show them the house. It was my duty to round up the cats and shove them in a large pet carrier so the buyers could tour the house without a cat attack. I get Moe in first, but Murphy protests and proceeds to pee a large amount of urine all over me. I am completely soaked on one side of my body. I had to rush upstairs, change out of my clothes and change fast before the buyers walked in. Thankfully, Murphy didn’t blow that sale.

With my clothes soaked in pee and a potential tornado outside, I did what most guys would do in that situation, I went back upstairs to change.

I ran into my bedroom again, grabbed a shirt and a pair of shorts and went downstairs into the storeroom with the cats to change.

When all was said and done, I joined our guests downstairs as we waited for the storm to subside. The funnel cloud didn’t drop, so we were spared damage.

The next day, I told my brother, Bill, about the experience.

His first question was: “Did you get video?”

Yeah… Because that was my first instinct! Screw getting my family safe and the animals safe. I needed to make sure that I got some sweet video of a possible tornado. Granted, that would have been cool, but my mind was elsewhere…

Video Game Tester: Gaining weight is easy when you sit and snack all day...

I started writing about my days as a video game tester in California.

I Once Had a Job Testing Video Game
A Hella Cool Pop in the City

I am not what you call a thin man. I've always been a little on the girthy side. I had a brief spurt of thinness when I came back from Army basic training (I was in the National Guard), but I quickly gained it back by sitting on my butt watching TV and drinking regular pop.

One glorious Spring/Summer of 1999 when I went on the Atkins diet, I lost about 20 pounds. I had dropped down from 225 to about 205 in a few months of dieting. Everyone was impressed at my resolve. I avoided sweets like the plague. I didn't eat bread. I took vitamins. I worked out. I rode my mountain bike. I played basketball. I was a "lean, mean, fighting machine" or at least lean...

After I obtained my job as a video game tester, I suddenly found it harder and harder to maintain my diet. I tried, but with things like meat and eggs now costing about twice as much in California than what they cost in Nebraska, I was forced to start skipping the protein and eating like a normal person.

My first week at the video game company, people would run and get a soda (see the hella story) often. I would go and buy my diet pop from the vending machines, which was adding to my daily costs in the city. Laura quickly started to complain about. It was bad enough we were shelling out 10 bucks a day for me to commute, but I shouldn't spoil myself from the vending machines! This would be a continual point of contention for us during our stay in California.

Before long, I was asked by a co-worker if I wanted to go and get a "soda". So we walked across the hall to the other side of the building into the break room. I pull out some money and start to put in the vending machine. He pulls open a large cooler filled to the brim with pop and takes two out. He asks what I'm doing. I tell him I'm buying a pop (duh). He then tells me that the pop is free. Turns out, our company, to compensate for the long hours required to work there, furnished pop for us.

Great! But the bad news was, the pop was all sugar pop. I initially resisted the urge by trying to bring in my own pop in my cooler, but then Laura started insisting that I buy, instead of my usual Diet Dr. Pepper, a cheap knockoff from a major retailer who shall remain nameless. I started bringing those, but those generic diet pops started losing their luster rather early. Oh sure, they tasted like Diet Dr. Pepper, kind of, but only if you drank it ice cold and really fast. Otherwise, you were stuck with a cheap knockoff that tasted like it was canned at the bottom of a metal bucket. So much so that I started to wonder if I was going to suffer from metal poisoning. Being the hypochondriac that I am, I had to make a decision. Chug down the generic swill or drink the forbidden sugar pop.

It wasn't a hard decision. I started drinking it.

It was pretty sweet. Some guys would start stocking it around Tuesday and if you were the lucky ones to get first dibs, you grabbed a few cans while they were warm to hide in your cube for the end of the week. Once it was cold, it was a pop lover's heaven.

Now there is a little bit of a problem when you start drinking sugar pop at a job in which you are required to sit there and just twiddle your hands all day long: you increase your calorie intake without a way to burn it off. Considering that I was working about 10 hours a day, I think it was safe to say that I was drinking about 5 pops a day during work alone. That alone accounts for over 1000 calories. When you couple that with the various snacks that I would eat all day like chips, popcorn and snack cakes, you are spelling a recipe for some nice weight gain.

There's an old Simpsons episode where Homer deliberately gets to over 300 so that he could be considered morbidly obese and could go on disability. He goes to the mall to get something to wear when he goes to "work" at home. The guy asks if he works with, around or something with computers. Homer says, "I work at a computer." The guy mutters to himself that it must be all the non-stop sitting and snacking. I can relate to that statement as I worked in a place where you could do non-stop sitting and snacking.

Now there I was in some nice shape when I came to California and I was ruining it by eating bad. To top that off, I wasn't working out. I had intended to work out, but when you do nothing but work and have little time off to yourself, the last thing you want to do is to do some more "work" by working out.

At work, I had tried to eat right, but that is expensive! If you take away the free donuts and the free pop, you end up having to drink some orange juice if you don't water. The OJ alone was two fifty at the food shop down in the atrium.

I tried to go without the extra pop and snacks, but when you're playing the same game or the same level of a game over and over and over until you want to shoot yourself in the head, your eyes will start to droop and you'll feel a little tired. Soon enough, your head will start to nod and then your body will twitch violently. You look around to see if anyone noticed that you kind of fell asleep. Then, before you know it, you WILL fall asleep! You'll wake up to see that you have run off the road in the Formula 1 game that you're testing and your car is nuzzled against a fence off-road while the in-game timer shows that you are 10 minutes into a two minute race!

This actually happened to me.

Scott, the co-worker from Ohio, mentioned to me that a former worker was notorious to taking cat naps while he was supposed to be testing. It was hard to catch him because his demeanor was a sleeply-eyed testing face. He'd look like he was sleeping, but then he'd move and the game would continue.

One day, Scott was walking by while the worker was supposed to be testing our free-form cuddly video game when he noticed that the in-game timer, which probably should be only at 3 minutes because the levels were pretty fast to finish, was now at 40 minutes. Scott yelled, "Juan! You're supposed to be testing, not sleeping!"

For fear of falling asleep, I would drink and eat to stay awake. At first you feel guilty about it, but then it becomes a natural habit.

My attempts at working out turned into doing some jumping jacks before work in my cube when no one was around and feeling like an idiot doing it. Having almost been interrupted more than once, I quickly disbanded the working out fever and resolved to gradually getting out of shape.

Oh sure, Laura and I would go hiking in the hills around our adopted hometown of Vacaville, but when you only do that once a week, the odds that you'll actually get a benefit and keep the pounds off are very slim indeed. I did also try to use the apartment complex "gym" that consisted of some really old exercise bikes and a really old weight station. The apartment manager told me after I used it that most residents use it a few times and then never come back. Well, it wasn't hard to figure out why...

But it wasn't just me with my snacking and eating. Because you could eat at your desk, you could walk around and see people eating Chinese food from containers, salads, yogurt, burgers and fries, sandwiches, frozen smoothies from downstairs, flavored coffees, frozen dinners, candy bars, popcorn, etc.

What was interesting about the ripple effect was that in the morning, the testing bay (the closed off area where we worked) actually smelled decent, but by the end of the day, it would smell like a take-out food mash-up what will all of people's food stuffed into people's tiny garbage cans outside of their cubes. After a while, our supervisor got so sick of the smell that she encouraged us to throw our stuff away outside the bay in the snack bar area's big garbage cans. I actually started to do this, but my attempts to kiss some behind and suck up to the boss fell on deaf ears. The place still ended up smelling.

What was worse was on Friday, when people would order out more to celebrate the weekly Friday paycheck. The food would pile up worse in the tiny garbage cans. Then when the weekend came, the building would shut the air ventilation off to save energy, which would create a nice semi-humid sauna just right for spreading the rank food smell around. So if you had to work Saturday or Sunday for overtime (which was often), this was an oh-so-pleasant aroma to take in while trying to work. We'd try propping open doors to get the rank smell out until the cleaning crew came on Sunday night, but it wouldn't help much. I took to bringing Lysol to spray down my area, which helped immensely.

Because of the previously mentioned snacking and eating, I ended up gaining weight.

I think I must have gained twenty pounds. When I arrived back in Nebraska some 10 months later, I was sitting down with my brother, Bill, who ever-so tactfully looked at me, laughed and then asked, "How much weight have you gained?"

I replied that I didn't know.

He then called me "Bobba the Hut" and quipped in a Jabba the Hut voice, "Bobba eata a lotta co nichua video gama. Ha Ha Ha."

You bastard...

What I remember about September 11th...

I have vivid memories of September11th. I think we always have that stamped in our memories when we experience a national disaster. I remember that when the space shuttle blew up for the first time, I was in my eighth-grade photography class. Our teacher was especially shaken up because he had applied to be the teacher that was picked to go up with the other astronauts.

When the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, I had just started student teaching in Grand Island, my home town. I remember watching CNN a lot to get whatever new information I could. It seemed to annoy my partner teacher, who for some reason quickly lost interest. Maybe she was just jaded from the draining school year.

When the attack on September 11th occurred, I was at home because I was unemployed. The Internet start-up company that I worked for laid me off about three weeks prior to that, which was two weeks after my daughter, Julia, was born, which was three months after I had bought my first home.

All in all, it was already a stressful situation. So there I was sitting at home waiting for job offers and taking care of my daughter with my wife, who was on her maternity leave.

We turned on the TV that morning and were struck by the image of one of the towers burning in New York City. Shortly after that, the other tower was in flames when the second plane hit it. One of the Good Morning America news anchors asked befuddled, "What is going on?"

We watched with stunned faces at the happenings in New York City. After a while, we had to stop watching and we started getting going with our day. We had to eat. We fed our daughter. We started some laundry.

At some point, we started talking about the job situation. A couple weeks prior, I had applied at a place I'll call The Company. I got an interview with The Company a week prior. I interviewed with no problem. It was a standard first interview, well... standard if you can picture a whole interview in which the interviewer is almost trying to talk you out of working at the company...

It was a suit and tie company. He laid that out clearly. Then he started going over the rules. Much like the ten commandments, these were a set of rules that shouldn't be broken. He said that at The Company, they don't allow you to have a lot of pictures and such on your desk. You desk should remain clean. For that matter, you can't drink or eat at your desk. Food was definitely not allowed at your desk. No liquids of any kind were allowed on your desk since they could spill and ruin your equipment. You were expected to be at your desk and ready to work at 8 am and could leave no earlier than 5 pm. You must never lean against the walls or on a desk (there was a reason the buildings still looked new he told me). You weren't allowed to read a newspaper or do anything non-company at your desk. You had to wear a suit and tie to work, but you could hang the coat up when you came in. You also weren't allowed to walk on the grass (this I had accidentally done... oops)

I was in dire straits for a job, so I told him that I'd have no problem with those rules, so he said that they would consider me for a second interview after he decided where I best fit.

My wife asked the prior morning on Sept 10th, if I thought I might get a call from The Company. I thought that I might.

The next morning, she asked, "You don't think they're going to call today do you? Probably not, right?"

I thought of the chaos on the TV and couldn't imagine that they'd call me for an interview that day. After all, they had completely shut down air travel and I came to find out later that a lot of businesses sent their employee's home for the day. One exception was The Company.

The phone rang at about 10:30, literally minutes after the second tower fell to the ground. My wife answered. She called for me with a confused look on her face. I walked over and she mouthed that she thought it was the company.

It was indeed someone from The Company. Amidst all that chaos, they had still came through on their plans to call me for an interview. I remember trying to concentrate on what the person was telling me because I kept thinking, "This is weird. Don't they know what's going on today?"

I came to find out later that the employees there were all expected to go back to work. Only one computer on the QA floor had internet access and it was used to feed curious and fearful employees information on what was going on that day.

I know it's not wrong to make your employees work. After all, the second tower workers were told to go back to work with the first tower in flames, but it was just kind of weird that they would call on that day. Not that I'm complaining since it did lead to a job for me, but it was still a little weird and very surreal. Plus, it was a sign of things to come at that job, but that's another story.

I will NOT get you a glass of water...

A short, short story for anyone who cares. I'm in the process of writing another story about video game testing, but it's taking awhile. Also, I'm getting to the point of the story where I think, "Does anyone care about this?" and almost ditching it like I've done with quite a few stories...


I live in a new subdivision in Omaha. It's pretty nice that we got to move into a neighborhood that's new because almost everybody that's moved in is around the same age with kids of varying ages. That's kind of what attracted us to build a new house. THAT and the ability for my wife to pick exactly what she wants in the house, price be damned! But that's another story...

Including my daughter, there are about 9 or 10 kids that play on our end at any given time. The run around. The chase each other. They ride bikes. They play on Julia's swingset. They jump on the trampoline.

Not that I'm complaining, but one of the drawback of having that many kids in your house or your neighborhood that they invariably will want to eat, get a drink of water or use your bathroom.

The eating is not so bad. I just offer them something that I know they'll turn down and they turn it down without asking for something else. What? You don't want to eat a peanut butter and Miracle Whip sandwich? To each their own.

Before I kept a tab on this, Julia was grabbing stuff out of the pantry and feeding her friends everything from cheese puffs to potato chips, which would leave a lot of evidence behind that she was doing thing, unless the cheese puffs all over the floor are lying to me...

Which brings me to a point. Is it impossible for kinds 3 to 6 to not eat chips, crackers or popcorn without spilling them all over the floor? Either Julia dumps the bowl that she was balancing on her knee on the floor or the floor is littered with remnants from her eating. She has popcorn as a snack a lot and the floor is littered with kernels and puffed corn remnants. It's like she eats like the Cookie Monster with popcorn spraying every where.

What is irritating are the requests for drinks. Usually, it centers on someone (me) getting a kid a glass of water. Water isn't usually what they ask for. Usually they ask for some juice or milk, but since Julia tends to not drink either, I don't have it to give to them. This is usually followed by exasperated looks like they cannot believe that any sane person wouldn't have a juice box for a begging kid. So I give them a glass of water, which they drink about two drinks of, set down and leave it for me or the cats to knock over. All that effort for two drinks? I guess you could say that I'm the moron for giving them drinks that they won't finish.

I set this all up to tell this short story...

The other day, I was mowing my lawn. It was after work on a weekday and I was trying to get my lawn mowed before it got dark. Plus, I had a limited amount of gas, so I was trying to squeeze out the mowing on 1/3 of a tank before I ran out. Like any time I mow, I move fast so that I can get sort of a workout in.

I'm about halfway done with the back yard trying to finish up the mow job when Andy, the kid from two houses down saunters up. He's about 9-years-old and one of the oldest kids on our side of the block.

He yells, "Bob! Bob"

I turn my head, see Andy, turn off the mower, pull my walkman CD player out of my pocket and turn it off. I pull the headphones out of my ears.

"What?" I breathe heavily as I've been working up a sweat.

"Can I have a glass of water?"

I stare at him. Here I am sweating my ass off trying to mow the lawn and Andy is asking me for a glass of water.

"I'd get it myself, but Moe won't let me inside." Moe is one of our cats and he hates people, or at least, other people. He loves me and my family, but is incredibly vicious to strangers. He's been known to lunge at the kids and pat them with his paws because he's annoyed with the kids.

Andy must have opened the door, seen Moe there and Moe hissed at him, so he didn't risk walking in.

"I think he might bite me," Andy finished.

I looked over at Andy's house just two houses away.

"No offense, but isn't your house right over there? Can't you go to your own house to get a drink?"

"I guess so," he said smiling.

I immediately felt a little bad. Well, not really bad, but just a little. After all, I was never given the kind of slack these neighborhood kids get. I don't think they realize how good they have it. I may give them glasses of water while they're inside my house, but I will NOT get them a glass of water when I'm mowing. That's where I draw the line...