"Everything of value to me is on this bed."

I hate weather announcements for two reasons. The first is pragmatic -- it takes up too much of the television screen. Nothing is worse than the local station plastering their logos adds and local maps all over the show I'm trying to watch! The second reason is that it serves -- outside of a tornado warning -- no purpose. Last night there was a severe thunderstorm warning at 10:30. I'm really glad they warned me. I'll cancel that midnight round of golf that I was planning! It seems that as our culture gets more disconnected from nature in their daily routines, the more obsessive we get about knowing the weather! Okay, that's enough for the rant. Last night however, our local siren went off, so I shut off the movie I was watching and tuned in to a local station just in time to hear that my area was directly in the path of an aggressive storm system that had the potential to spawn tornados (sounds like somebody is playing a little CYA in the newsroom -- nobody wants to be the station that said "no big deal" just before a cat. 4 tornado rips through). Since they named my area of Peoria county specifically, I made the responsible father decision to move my family to the basement. So I hurriedly blew up the air mattress and all five of us went and laid on the air mattress for about a half hour listening to a tremendous thunderstorm as it passed over. Anyway, I have an active imagination and I was laying thinking..."what if a tornado really leveled our house?" And I opened my eyes, looked at my baby cuddled against me, my five-year old looking at me with his eyes wide open, the back of my 3-year old's head and my wife on the other side and this thought, from deep inside of my being burst to the surface, "Everything of value to me is on this bed."