The General Chat Thread (2024)

TastyReuben said:
People have private insurance, so now starts the long process of filing claims and going back and forth with adjusters, I suppose. I think there are usually some government assistance funds that people can apply for as well, but I don’t know for sure.

As to how often, it just depends on the weather. If I had to guess, we’ve lived in our current house almost 20 years, and we’ve averaged maybe a tornado a year that’s come close enough to see/hear, but those are mostly F0 and F1 tornadoes - they might blow some shingles off the roof or tip your doghouse over. We’ve lost siding on the house twice.

We’ve had maybe two bigger ones come through, ones that make you grab the wife, the dog, and your banjo and head to the innermost room/basement/crawlspace of your house and wait it out. The last one of those was probably six or seven years ago, and it shook the house enough to knock some things over. We don’t have a basement, and I’m more scared of spiders than I am tornadoes, so I refused to go into the crawlspace, so we rode it out in an interior closet, underneath a mattress.

Used to be, tornado season was mid-June to early-September, but the way things are now, it’s become nearly year-round. We had our first tornado alert last month, which was unheard of just a few years ago, and we’ve had them recently as late as November.
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FEMA. I am familiar with it mostly because I grew up in Florida and there are lots of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic, and I had a few friends who lost their homes and ended up living in FEMA trailers for awhile. And my DH is a retired insurance large loss adjuster so he has worked a lot of storms.
 
TastyReuben said:
1. You’re as low as possible, which you always want to be in a tornado

2. You have a whole house between you and it
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Some people get in bathtubs. We have a very large basement. It's not a finished basement and has a concrete floor. It's big enough that my son used to be able to rollerblade in it and practice hockey.
 
SandwichShortOfAPicnic said:
What a dream for a kid to have that to play in!
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Now my husband has his wine making operation in it...plus a lot of our kids' stuff they didn't take with them when they grew up and moved out on their own. We've asked them to come sort through it and take what they want and throw the rest out. I guess after we die they will have to do that. Pretty sure most of it will end up in the trash bin!
 
JAS_OH1 said:
Now my husband has his wine making operation in it...plus a lot of our kids' stuff they didn't take with them when they grew up and moved out on their own. We've asked them to come sort through it and take what they want and throw the rest out. I guess after we die they will have to do that. Pretty sure most of it will end up in the trash bin!
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I can see that happening here too. They have moved out officially but haven't really so still have a lot of their things here, I'm not sure they'll ever take them 😆
 
JAS_OH1 said:
Some people get in bathtubs. We have a very large basement. It's not a finished basement and has a concrete floor. It's big enough that my son used to be able to rollerblade in it and practice hockey.
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The bathtub thing made more sense back when tubs were enameled cast iron or porcelain or whatever and had some heft to them, but so many tubs these days (including ours) is flimsy molded plastic, so that’s pretty useless.

When I was a kid, we had a full basement and a stairwell that my dad reinforced specifically as a storm shelter, plus if things got too hairy, a smokehouse/root cellar, where the cellar (as the name would indicate) was underground on three sides, so I never worried much about tornadoes then.

Now, we have no real shelter. They always say to put as many walls between you and the outside during a tornado…we have exactly one space, a closet, that doesn’t have an outside wall, though the outside wall is only about five feet away, so we’re about one step up from a trailer in that respect.
 
TastyReuben said:
The bathtub thing made more sense back when tubs were enameled cast iron or porcelain or whatever and had some heft to them, but so many tubs these days (including ours) is flimsy molded plastic, so that’s pretty useless.

When I was a kid, we had a full basement and a stairwell that my dad reinforced specifically as a storm shelter, plus if things got too hairy, a smokehouse/root cellar, where the cellar (as the name would indicate) was underground on three sides, so I never worried much about tornadoes then.

Now, we have no real shelter. They always say to put as many walls between you and the outside during a tornado…we have exactly one space, a closet, that doesn’t have an outside wall, though the outside wall is only about five feet away, so we’re about one step up from a trailer in that respect.
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I love watching movies where everyone is racing to get into the root cellar...those things are so cool. The house next door has one. The house was built in 1809 and was the first general store in our area, back when there was nothing here but fields and dirt roads, basically. It was also a part of the underground railroad and has a tunnel in the basement that goes under the road and out to a large grassy field that is now part of the metro park and is adjacent to Firestone Country Club (where they used to have the PGA tournaments). Anyway, I wish we would have bought that house years ago when it was up for sale, I would have loved to have that piece of history.
 
SandwichShortOfAPicnic said:
I can see that happening here too. They have moved out officially but haven't really so still have a lot of their things here, I'm not sure they'll ever take them 😆
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I think they feel like a part of them still lives at home and that's why they won't come do it. It's a symbolic thing. I know people who leave their kids' bedrooms untouched with the old posters and trophies and such, stuff animals, etc. still intact, LOL.
 
JAS_OH1 said:
I think they feel like a part of them still lives at home and that's why they won't come do it. It's a symbolic thing. I know people who leave their kids' bedrooms untouched with the old posters and trophies and such, stuff animals, etc. still intact, LOL.
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When I mentioned just a couple of days ago that my mum cleared my room out two weeks after I left and I didn't like it so I wouldn't do that to them my son piped up in a truly indignant tone "But I still live here!!" 😂
 
My grandparents in Western Kentucky had a root cellar built partially into the ground when they still lived in a log cabin type house when I was still really little. Grandaddy built a brick house with a full basement that had a bedroom, a huge family room area, a storage pantry, and a small food prep area, plus room for some of the farm animals if they had time. It had 2 entries/exits, a steep, narrow staircase up thru the center of the house and wide double heavy wood doors with wide steps up to the back porch. The doors had locks, plus they could be braced with large wood planks. They still used the root cellar as well.

Hurricanes spawn tornadoes as well. Some of the worst damage from a hurricane is from tornadoes. I saw a picture of a piece of siding twisted once around a pole on the recent news coverage of the Ohio weather. When the hurricane hit Craig's brother's area, there were pieces of siding spiral wrapped around poles.
 
JAS_OH1 said:
I love watching movies where everyone is racing to get into the root cellar.
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medtran49 said:
My grandparents in Western Kentucky had a root cellar
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Here’s the smokehouse/root cellar we had growing up:

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You can’t really tell, but that’s two levels - smokehouse on top, and there on the right, that’s a dirt bank that goes down to the door of the root cellar, so the two side walls and the back wall were all underground.

I loved the smokehouse because it smelled good, like woodsmoke and curing meat, but I was terrified of the root cellar because it was absolutely chock full of spiders. You know those movie scenes where the hero opens up some tomb or cavern, and it looks like the walls are moving because of all the spiders? Not quite that bad, but not far off.

We kept home-canned things down there, and a huge bin (a good bit bigger than a full-sized chest freezer) with potatoes on one side and onions on the other. Whenever I had to go in there, I’d use a hoe to pull the door open, and hit the light switch with the handle, then go do something else for 15 minutes, to give the spiders a change to settle down, then in and out as fast as I could with whatever Mom wanted.

The bin was the worst, and I’d do the same thing - prop open the lid with a stick to give the spiders some warning, because there’d be dozens of them on the underside of the lid.
 
Grandaddy didn't do any smoking so they didn't have a smokehouse.

There was an apple tree and a pecan tree on the 2 sides of the root cellar not buried into the ground. So, we'd climb up to the top of the root cellar, it was basically a concrete bunker with a flat top, to play and have snacks we could pick ourselves at various times of the year.

No spiders dared invade my grandmother's root cellar. Nothing survived in there except canned food. We'd happily get stuff out of there, especially peaches or cherries when she'd make pie.
 
We're off to the posh cinema tomorrow for hubby's birthday to see Dune 2. There are 48 reclining chairs per lounge, 2 premiere lounges and you can order drinks and food from the licenced bar to be brought to you during the film. It's his birthday treat.
 
Hubby also spent the afternoon climbing trees along our track. Our ladders are not long enough to reach the branches that needed cutting off, so he comes the ladders, then comes the tree off the ladder, cuts off the required branches and .... the reason why?

When he went in to get the $550 refund on our new mattress, they advised him that it is down for delivery in Thursday, so he needed to trim one or two branches that have grown downwards since my 6 week campaign 3 years ago (it took me 6 weeks to cut every single one of the 108 pine trees back to clear the track for larger vehicle (and that actually included my 4×4 in that category), some 3 years ago. )
 
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