eleventh new thing...

and this is where the wheels came off. this week, i had two possible ways to fulfill the eleventh of my 52 new things. the men's SEC tournament was going on at the dome downtown and a st. patty's day themed 5K and 10K was scheduled for sunday. so i would either attend my first men's SEC tournament game or i would run in and finish a 10K in under 60 minutes. sweetness, right? if the commodores choke (and surely that wouldn't happen) before i was able to get to a game i would simply head to the race on sunday and be totally covered. but then mother nature got involved. and all hell broke loose.

i left work early on friday with the intention of heading down to the dome to catch the commodore/razorback game. after a brief text conversation with a sab about the weather-- which was suppose to be all thunderstormy-- i decided to wait until saturday when it would be nicer to hop on marta and brave the crowds. well, wouldn't you know, the boys lost. to arkansas. for the second time in a week. nice. option number one gone. but i settled in for a movie and a rockin' bar-b-que chicken pizza with my buddy curt content with the thought of running the road race on sunday. no worries.

around 930 a storm came up out of nowhere that distracted us from starting our movie. curt and i walked out on to the porch to watch it a little more closely, stuck our hands out into the forcefully falling rain and marveled at the extreme nature of the lightning. but as a tampa native (lightning capital of the world, bitches!) and survivor of the 2004 hurricane season, i had definitely seen worse. i mean, the lights didn't even flicker. back to fight club.

around 1130 two simultaneous text messages dropped on mine and curt's cell phone. k dub-- ever the worrier-- was wondering if we were ok. why wouldn't we be? as the movie ended, i turned off the dvd player and was met with images of the cnn building in pieces, pieces of the dome falling on to the court, and general mayhem and destruction in downtown atlanta. holy crap! apparently, at 940 an F2 tornado ripped a path from northeast atlanta diagonally to southwest atlanta, causing the most severe damage near centennial olympic park and into cabbagetown. it was the first time such a weather event had ever happened in downtown atlanta-- but not the first in a major city i lived in (i'm beginning to think i have bad weather karma). the resulting damage closed a large swath of downtown atlanta for the remainder of the weekend, canceling the city's st. patrick's day parade and postponing the junior league's road race. great. option two down the tubes. now what?

so in a week when i had two possible ways to accomplish a new thing i ended up doing something i never meant to: i survived a deadly tornado and never even knew it.