Be careful what you ask for

That's the feeling I had Monday morning about 0-dawn-30.

I had come to the Midwest on vacation with the usual wants -- fun, frivolity and a Royals baseball game. Oh, add a honest-to-goodness Midwest thunderstorm. Not the kind in Cali that sparks endless forest fires, but the kind where you get to stand in warm rain and see the cool bolt lightning.

Well, our first night in Muscatine, Iowa, we swam, had dinner and relaxed on the deck until the mosquitoes had dinner on us (there is still a ton of standing water from their recent floods).

An hour or so after heading in, the skies lit up with lightning, boomed with thunder and weeped with rain. Cool. Check that one off the list.

But, oh no. Mother Nature wasn't done. I've always laughed at people in California who actually watch the Weather Channel. It's pointless.

But not in the Midwest. It's essential. The weather changes more than No. 1's moods.

And it has to be tiring to hear daily that a thunderstorm might be on its way -- the same way I'd get tired if the USGS told me an earthquake might be happening tonight.

But we went to bed Sunday with the thunderstorm warning, although my Uncle Mark and I had plans for an 8 a.m. golf outing.

Not so fast.

About 3:30 a.m. the heavens opened. Lightning. Thunder. Rain -- wideways rain. And winds -- gale-force winds.

It woke me up long enough to realize I wasn't going to play golf and turn the cell phone alarm off. Then, about 5:15 a.m. my cousin's son, Jake, came in and said his mom and dad wanted to see me.

Serious faces for so early. Steve said I should be prepared to shepherd everyone to the basement, that the tornado sirens should be wailing shortly. You know shit it serious when people who live there look a little panicked.

We watched the Weather Channel, saw a super cell moving over us in a color I didn't know existed (usually it's red for monsoon rains) and right as the loop showed the cell passing over Muscatine the power shut off.

What the hell?

Well, the worst of it had passed, the storm shuffled east into Illinois. But the damage had been done (pictures coming when I can download them off the camera). We went to Davenport in the morning and saw destruction and misery. It really was a storm they'll be talking about for the next decade (Do you remember that day ...).

The puzzling thing to me, however, was where in the hell were the tornado sirens? With sustained winds of 95 mph, I wanted sirens. According to the news, they were straight-line winds and not a vortex. I assume there wasn't any hot air to mix with cold and form a tornado. Still, it was more than I asked for.