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September 22, 2006

This One's not about Sears, but about Jennifer Lopez and Tornados.

By: The Dude on the Right
As the day started out I only had one idea for a blog today, and that was to say that I might shop at Sears again.  This was in follow-up to a blog I wrote a few weeks ago, even though I never fully explained my Mom's issue with Sears.  But the other day my Mom e-mailed me that it seems the letter she wrote to the CEO person at Sears expressing her disappointment with her purchase had a result.  And I was going to share that with you, until, today, I realized I still want to be a Jennifer Lopez stalker.

And not the Jennifer Lopez you might think, the one who gets made fun of for having a big booty.

I'm talking about a different Jennifer Lopez, and it came about like this...

I was doing some computer consulting south of Chicago today, and in the forecast was the chance for some severe weather in the Chi-Town area.  In about the middle of the afternoon I checked the local radar on my cell phone and coming near the dude-pad was a rain-cell with some yellow and orange.  At this point I knew the storms were starting to fire up, but didn't really think nothing of it.  At least until I was heading back home.

Suddenly my cell phone started playing the "Looney Tunes" theme so I knew it was someone I knew, and then I saw it was a text message.  I recognized the call-sign, and it was "The Weather Channel" letting me know that there was a tornado warning in the city I live in.  Yup, that's right, a tornado warning.  "Fuck," I thought to myself.  And then my cell phone started ringing again, and even though the phone number was strange I answered it, and it was a pre-recorded message from Jim Cantore from "The Weather Channel, also telling me there was a tornado warning where I lived.

It was a couple of years ago that I subscribed to "The Weather Channel's" "Notify!" service, and even though I had heard Jim Cantore call me before (because I had set my alert levels to broad), this time it was doing exactly what I subscribed it to do, because the only thing I really worry about, where I live, are tornados, because I can pay enough attention to the weather to know if thunderstorms are coming, if snowstorms are coming, but tornadoes don't give you a lot of warning and my messages from "The Weather Channel" beat my local radio news channels by about 5 minutes, which I wouldn't have even tuned into (I'm a Sirius satellite radio fan) unless I had gotten that initial text message.

So I'm still driving home, and find out that the tornado warnings are north of the dude-pad, and I say warnings because I also got a couple of other messages on my phone on my way home that the tornado warnings were expanding around me.  But I get home, and this is really where my Jennifer Lopez stalking rekindled.

At times I am a Weather Channel junkie.  I can watch it for hours, although I'm not as addicted to the colorful graphics as my sister, she still goes through withdrawals when she doesn't get enough.  Part of my watching, though, is for the weather dudettes, and a while back Jennifer Lopez was my girl.  She was cute, has a great smile, even got pregnant, but I was her fan.  Then I slowly got off of my Weather Channel addiction, except only for the major weather, and in the case of a hurricane, Stephanie Abrams was the new girl for me.  Blowing out there in the wind, hoping shit wasn't going to hit her in the head, she also had a great smile, a bubbly personality, and I was her weather fan.

Until today.

When I get home, wondering if a tornado is going to come blowing away the dude-pad, I quickly tuned to The Weather Channel and there was Jennifer Lopez, looking as smoking-hot as ever on my TV, with a different hairdo than I remembered, and she got me through the danger of wondering if the life around me would be destroyed by a tornado (actually, I was able to read the radar and knew I was pretty much safe, but it was still fantastic to see her).

I don't know if the weather caused any tragedies right now in the Chicagoland area, and I know a lot of it was bad, but a big part of me was glad the pre-recorded Jim Cantore called me, warning of deadly weather nearby, but now that I'm back being a stalker of Jennifer Lopez, I wonder if the "Weather Channel" "Notify!" service could tailor who calls you when the weather blows.  I know I would prefer hearing Jennifer Lopez blowing me bad news, rather than Jim Cantore.

But on a serious note, if you are in an area where immediate bad weather can come and destroy your life, like a tornado, and you don't always make yourself aware, subscribe to a service like "Notify!", buy one of those weather radios at Radio Shack (it helped me when I was a manager of a "Shack" once), or anything.  As much as I would prefer Jennifer Lopez calling me rather than Jim Cantore, and even though the tornado warnings were north of my dude-pad, I felt better getting the warnings, minutes before I was notified in other ways, and if things were bad, those minutes might have saved my life, or at least given me ample time to get my camera.

That's it for this one!  I'm The Dude on the Right!!  L8R!!!

Posted by Rightdude at 8:34 PM | Comments (0)