On the weekend of March 14-16, 2025, a massive line of storms slowly crawled across the US, from Oklahoma toward the coast. Sustained straight-line winds were severe enough, whipping up wildfires and house fires and flipping tractor trailers over, but it also spawned dozens of tornadoes, and overall it killed at least 39 people.
Here in St. Louis, it knocked out power to 100,000 homes. There was no damage on our property (aside from having to throw away some food), and just a bit of siding torn off the church at the end of the street. An already sickly tree in my parents’ yard lost most of its limbs (luckily just falling where they were), and some kind of metal box on their roof has a few dings from hail. Within a few blocks of them though, there were huge trees down, and one house that was dramatically speared by a tornado-tossed tree. A tornado seems to have charged right up a nearby creek, overturning trees and destroying a few rooftops.
We’re definitely grateful to have been spared, but a weekend with no power is still a hassle. My parents’ generator certainly came in handy, and we mostly spent the weekend with them, making slow cooker Irish stew, cutting up some of the fallen tree, assembling some furniture. We played the board game Azul — which seems to be pretty neat, but it was the first time for all of us and we got some of the rules wrong, including scoring with three different methods that were all wrong 🙂 But going back home, no light, no internet, no heat (temps went from 82F pre-storm to 34F post-storm), no fan (which really helps me sleep), etc. was just not a lot of fun.
I still prefer power failure during cold weather over during hot weather. Our previous two major outages happened in early July and lasted four miserable days.
One of the things I did to pass the time was finish reading Chlorine. Written by a nonbinary author, it’s about a queer high school girl with a thing for mermaids, who is an excellent competitive swimmer under far too much pressure. Avoiding spoilers, I will just mention “multiple forms of abuse” and “body horror” and leave it at that. It was an excellent and enthralling novel, but not an easy or pleasant one.
I have to wonder to what extent the swim team’s suffering was actually typical of elite athletes (e.g. Olympic hopefuls), and to what extent it was exaggerated or unusual. But I imagine there is a lot of pushing bodies far beyond what is healthy — intense training, inadequate rest, ignoring injuries that shouldn’t be ignored, extreme diets, learning to ignore pain even when it’s giving important warnings. Possibly quite a lot of psychological harm as well. Certainly society is slowly acknowledging the risks of head injuries etc. in certain sports…. not that things seem to be changing much to fix it. This book, coming not long after Body Neutral, tells a pretty bleak story. Society idolizes athletes and models, but simultaneously acts as if strength/endurance/beauty/etc. are virtues while also taking them for granted.