Note: To my friends who’ve lost power in the recent hurricane and are able to read this; take care of yourselves. We all hope things get cleaned up and back to normal soon. I will now make light of hurricanes and typhoons.

Although I’m from Kansas, I basically grew up in Colorado. As such, I’m comfortable in both mountains and plains and I am disturbingly comfortable with both blizzards and tornadoes.

Several years ago there was a tornado warning in my hometown while I was hanging out with several distant relatives at my grandmother’s house. The warning said that a tornado had been spotted in eastern Salina. Immediately, the out-of-towners looked at me and said “What do we do? What do we do?”

The devil over my left shoulder suggested I say “We DIE!” The devil over my right shoulder said “Let’s try and see it.” (Yes, if you’re counting that means no angels are present over my shoulders. Long story.) Since we were in Western Salina, the tornado had already passed us. If we were going to die, we would have already been dead. (Which, I realize, was not a very comforting thought.) The paths of tornadoes are pretty consistent (Southwest to Northeast) and once you know where they are in relation to where you are, you can pretty much figure out what to do; where they form is the hard part to figure out and I’ve run to the basement a couple times when the warning announced the tornado was not only Southeast of my mom’s house, but was practically down the street.

However, in Japan I’ve had to learn to live with two forces of nature that are more unpredictable: earthquakes and typhoons. The latter is more on my mind as Typhoon Number 8–the Japanese get so many they just number them–may or may not be on its way toward Tokyo by this Friday or Saturday. Part of the problem is that because Japan is a series of small and/or narrow islands, Typhoons take crazier paths than tornadoes. We’ve seen storms aim directly at Tokyo and then veer away. We’ve seen storms veer away, change their minds, and veer back. We’ve seen storms do a loop in the middle of the ocean and then graze Tokyo. We’ve seen them go North past Japan and then turn back South.

The biggest hassle–besides all the destruction–is that I’m expected to go to work unless it’s obvious that our area is going to be hit and the school calls my company and cancels classes. I’ve been half way to work, soaked from tips of my toes to the middle of my chest and wrestling with a disintegrating umbrella when I learned school had been cancelled. I’ve got to school in that condition and had to teach even though a quarter of the students were absent.

I think part of it is that typhoons are kind of familiar to the Japanese and they are not as scary as earthquakes. Similarly, I remember that, when I lived in Colorado, no matter how much snow we got, we never got a snow day. In fact, the only “snow day” I remember getting was because of a flu outbreak. (And yes, kids, I really did have to walk to school in blizzards so there. No, it wasn’t uphill both ways.)

Luckily, I have a day or two to double check our emergency supplies and hope we keep power.