There are tornadoes running rampant in the St. Cloud area today, along with insane downpour, wind, and even some hail. I never took tornadoes seriously until today. Growing up in Hudson, the tornadoes never made it past the St. Croix River. I forget now that I'm in the flat lands, ha ha.
It was so windy that the rain was going sideways, and tree branches weren't just falling, they were falling and drifting left and right. After I finished my Biology test (yeah, that didn't go over so well, despite my 5 hours of studying), I was walking back to the buses and saw that a lightning strike had set one of the St. John's freshman dorm complexes on fire. I knew I smelled something burning during my test...I guess it wasn't just the gears grinding in my head.
Thank god I got on the bus when I did...because 10 minutes later and we would have been forced off the road. The tornado made a straight shot east from St. John's campus to St. Ben's. So it was literally only a few minutes behind our bus. From what I've heard there was no wind damage to either campus, just the lightning and flood damage at St. John's.
I got to the cafeteria, grabbed a plate from Mongo Grill (it's JUST like Ghingis Grill in the cities), and sat down with Annalie. Security busts through the door shouting orders to get in the basement, leave all food behind, blah blah blah. So we do, and all I could manage to take with me was my fortune cookie. *sigh* All I could think about in that claustrophobic basement was how cold my french onion soup was getting :(
I like to believe that my fortune cookie brought me good luck, and deterred the storm. Had I not grabbed my cookie in desperation of subsiding my hunger pangs, who knows what would be left of St. Ben's, or, alas, the Mongo Grill.
So anyways, to sum up my story...
The good news: everybody lived, yay!
The bad news: my food was cold when I finally got to sit down to eat it.