Lest I forget: What else we did beside study

In the 1970's what was considerd cool to do was going to see stuff that were not available in Malaysia. I remember going to see the Old Calcutta at some place and to my utter disbelief the show was in nude. What a shocker. Could not remember much, but the cast came out in their dressing gowns and started to throw away their garb. It was a first for me to see a full frontal nudity on stage.
Other shows that I saw were Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, Cats to name some. I am not much of a life performance audience. Those show did not impress me at all.

Different ways of saying it

When I was in school, I was taught to speak and write the oxford? English, When I went to University Malaya for my first degree, we talked in Malaysian English and our written scripts were in English. I survived. I went to England for my first post graduate and discovered that the English people did not speak the way I was taught at school. I had a hard time comprehending the South Eastern Londoners speak. It was at Shoreditch that I first learnt that I could not make myself understood ( I did my first 6 months attachment) at that town.

Now living in the US, I had to adjust again. My first experience with American language was in Honolulu. Everyone at my place of work complimented me for my flawless English accent??. I thought I was speaking in just plain English (the way we speak, with no accent). Then i began to notice that the American speak differently, even the sentences are spoken with a different intonation. They pronounce words differently. The most common difference is the vowel A and O. The word bath becomes beth, the name Donna becomes Daana, dancing become dencing .etc.etc.

I live in the south central of the country and our accent here is way different than those living in the north. The people here called the northerners the Yankees. The people here have their own vocabularies that i have yet to master. It is hard to understand when they speak with each other. Of course, we know that standing in line means queuing up; the shopping cart is a trolley; the elevator is the lift; the drive through is the take away etc. etc.

Twisters, here they come

It is not even spring yet and the ice have not completely melted, and we already had a severe spring like storm. A few tornadoes spawned yesterday Tuesday February 11. There were 4 confirmed touchdowns in the whole state and one was responsible for wiping out the whole neighborhood and killing 8 people.

To most people, it was too early to have this kind of weather, so not everyone paid much attention. My husband said, when you are in Oklahoma, you have to respect the weather, it changes in minutes.

We heard over the news for days that we might have a bad weather coming our way from southern California and the jet stream was pumping in a lot of warm moisture from the gulf of Mexico, so very good ingredients for a severe storm. Everyone was expecting it, but not in the form of tornadoes.

Expecting to have rain and thunderstorms later in the day, my husband I went to town to get some supplies and to get some medicine for his flu. He had been under the weather for a couple of days. We went anyway, just in case we might have flash flooding with the expected rain.

It was noon when we got home and turned on the TV and saw that the weatherman was telling us that some little cells were developing on the western side of the state. We got moving, putting stuff in the underground cellar, just in case we need to get inside and spend some time there. It took me the whole afternoon to put together all the important documents, change of clothes, water, snack etc. inside the cellar. We had to make sure the flash lights were working, the battery powered TV was working, the scanner was working as well as the cell phones charged.

Then within minutes, the storm cells developed into nasty cells. (We watch on the TV radars). Then everything got more chaotic. Wall clouds dropping finger like tails as the tornado formed. Warning sirens went off and the tornado cut across the west side of the city and moving fast towards northeast. This happened around 2.55pm. I was watching it, but it was far from us, however the whole line of thunderstorm was moving east northeast, sooner or later it would come to us.

Every TV station was engrossed in what was happening in the city center, and they were just focusing it there with crews everywhere. When it was getting dark another big storm cells that had capability of producing a tornado was spotted south of the state moving in from Texas. This was the deadliest one. It ravaged the whole town and area near Ardmore killing 8 people and still counting. This was a dangerous one as it happened at 7:30pm when it was already dark.

Today, people are going around in daze and looking at the devastation. The tornado was 3/4 mile wide and was traveling on the ground for 25 miles, destroying everything in its path.

I am scared, but alhamdulillah we are alright except we had tremendous lightning, rain and hails and strong wind. I just pray that this is the only one we have for the whole year.

I could not get online to tell my friends since Tuesday and now glad to say that we are doing alright. My internet connection came on at noon today