Three Weeks: Weather

People moving to the Great Lakes basin from elsewhere often fret about tornadoes. I figure this is pretty much the same way I'd fret over earthquakes if I moved to the west coast. And whereas a long-time resident would blithely play guess-the-Richter, long-timers here just kind of shrug about tornadoes. They happen. Eh.

But you do get to recognize the signs.

When the sky is low and fast. When it's strangely warm and then abruptly cold. When the clouds have a greenish tinge and the light gets dusty looking and amber. When there are little dervishes kicking up persistently. These are the times one eyes up the sky and maybe wanders over to turn on the radio to listen for any warnings. One casually checks the location of the pets or the kids, just to know. One tries to recall, in the back of one's mind, where the battery powered radio is (or, these days, how much charge the iPod has).

Sharp response won't hit unless the siren actually goes off. That's when all the little, thoughtless preparations snap into gear, the adrenaline pumps, and it's Pets/Kids, Radio, Basement, Now. Breathe. Wait.

Waiting, predictably, is the hardest part.

Three Weeks: name

Why did you choose your journal name?

That's... kind of a long story, actually. I've been through three now. The first was my legal surname, under which I wrote a lot of porny fanfic. I was young and naive, okay?

(And my legal surname is actually one that I chose myself and shelled out the money and not inconsiderable trouble to have legally changed. You only get one freebe, in the US, and that's if you're getting married. I didn't change my name when I got married, because I'd already done that and it was /my/ name.)

So then I thought I wanted something less instantly google-able. And I settled on the name I'd chosen for my personal website. After a while and some further thought, though, I realized that I had a lot of material on that site that had to do with my 3-d life, and that was still a little closer than I wanted.

So finally I settled on "branch". As in, a branch in the path. Branching out. Besides, most of my personal symbolism involves trees. But that was already taken! So I wound up underscoring it, which was a pain in the butt.

When I moved to IJ, I thought, you know, I want a name I can type all in one go, no underscores. But "branch" still being taken, I needed something related but different. Eventually I settled on "branchandroot", which had a nicely inclusive ring to it and could be said and typed easily. I still use "Branch" as my given name, but I like my journal name quite a lot. In fact, I wound up creating a separate domain of that name for all my fandom stuff, leaving the original domain for the 3-d stuff with no direct overlap at all, which is kind of necessary.