Dear diary,

Our neighbors found a dog under their porch and asked us if we could feed her since we already have dog food! She is a puppy and mom thinks maybe she belonged to the college students who moved out when school ended, and that’s why she’s outside. We put up posters around the neighborhood and took her to the vet to see if anyone else was looking for her, but after a week no one claimed her so we adopted her and named her Copper, after the dog from the Fox and the Hound since that was what we were watching when our neighbors came over.

Copper has learned that Cookie is the alpha dog because she’s older, and she also thinks that our two cats Lily and Bailey are the alphas because they were here first, too. She will stand far away and let Lily dunk pieces of kibble into the water bowl for it to soak, even though neither of them want to eat it afterwards.

She also keeps trying to run away any time the door is open so we have to be careful that she doesn’t get out. She has escaped a few times already, and she has learned to jump over the chainlink fence when we’re in the yard. So now we have to put her on a long rope even inside the yard so she can’t get out.

I got to come home from school early because there was a bad thunderstorm coming, and later that afternoon the clouds got really dark!

Copper escaped outside when we were bringing in toys from the yard so they wouldn’t blow away in the wind, and mom had to chase her through the neighborhood and almost had to give up before the storm hit, but she finally caught her just in time.

We all had to go into the basement and bring the pets with us because the radio said there could be a tornado, even though it’s rare for there to ever be tornadoes where we live. I was watching out of the basement window because I had never seen one and wanted to know what it looked like, but I couldn’t see very well. At one point dad had us go into the closet just to be safe, and we stayed there for a while but nothing happened the whole time. That closet smells bad and there are spiders, so I hated it.

After the storm passed we were allowed to go back upstairs, and we found out later that there had been a tornado that came right up route 1 which is one street over from where we live! After dinner we went out in the car to see where it had gone, and a lot of other people were doing the same thing. It knocked a lot of trees down and the backside of the college campus was blocked off with fire trucks and police cars and ambulances, so it must have gone through there.

I got scared that there would be another one and we wouldn’t hear about it ahead of time, so I made us keep the weather channel on all night long. I wasn’t able to go to sleep in my room alone because I kept imagining a tornado hitting our house.

Dad brought me to the library and I borrowed as many books on tornadoes that I could find to learn more about them.

Did you know that there is a whole area called Tornado Alley where they happen all the time, and there are people who even follow them in their cars to do research? Tornadoes can be between an F0 size and an F5 size, and ours was an F3 which is very rare for where we live because we almost never get them and when they do happen, they’re usually only an F0 or F1 size. Tornadoes happen when there are supercell thunderstorms, so a tornado can’t come out of nowhere. Also the air has to be rotating in order for a tornado to happen, so that’s why they don’t always form.

I also found a book called Night of the Twisters where a boy has to hide in his basement bathtub from a bunch of tornadoes that destroy the whole house. It really makes you feel like you’re in the middle of tornado alley and I’m glad we don’t live there. If a tornado happens again at our house the best place to go would probably be the shower in the basement, not the closet, because it is a smaller room and it is on the inside of the house. But the closet is located under the front porch which is made of cement, so maybe that would actually be better? I will ask Dad.

On different note I have been drawing more Hanky Comics for my crush at school, so now I am drawing one where Hanky’s girlfriend Hankylina tames a wild tornado that she names Spike. It will become her pet and she is going to ride it like a horse to save Hanky from the Hanky Swiper.