No screwples please!

screw this!

left- or right-threaded? (screws, that is...)

Nearly screwed you for missing a screw there! With screws in, what would our names be?

Night night, sweet screws, everyone. Being summoned to bed . . . who knows what the outcome will be?

Ever read Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"?

guess my name would be wercs

ha-ha! Screwliam E. Screwland

Terry Walhus: Screwy Screwhus Ray Lopez: Screw Screwpez Riette Walton: Ree-Screw Screwton

Screwcey Screwra (it's catchy... like a disease)

Screwa, Princess of PowerScrew?

screwLA LA!

Please!...

you mean screwplease?

*sigh* if you screwfer...

I guess when all the screws are out the topic falls apart.

So screws are the only thing holding this topic together? Well, maybe Terry will let us borrow his tool so that we drive some more screws home!!!

And a mighty practiced tool it is!

Almost sounds like you are speaking from personal experience.

Personal experience isn't everything!

I did say, "ALMOST". And I agree. There are some things I would not want to experience personally. An F5 tornado is one of them. The last one missed my truck by less than a mile. A mile may sound like a long way to be from a tornado, but this tornado was three quarters of a mile in diameter. 300+ miles per hour winds. (close to 500KPH) Sucked the pavement off the ground. Hit a subdivision.

Good thing you weren't hauling a trailer house...

Amen to that, I was parked. They made us all get off I 35 right before it hit.

Shoot! That sounds dangerous! Does this sort of thing happen to you often?

First time. I hope it's the last time. I helped with the clean-up. It took us three days to find all? the pieces of what had been people. the tornado was so violent that it shredded cars like paper. One guy had over 100 55-57 chevy cars. after the tornado we found one battered sitting in the middle of a field. that was the most intact thing left. The tornado shredded him, his wife, their three kids. I'm glad I wasn't working in the morgue. they had to figure out which pieces went with which to make up bod es, which then had to be identified.

That's so horrible. I think many of us don't have a clue about what suffering is.

I don't think that those that were killed suffered much. Those left alive were in shock for weeks. The town was denied Federal disaster relief because, by the time the paperwork was done, everyone was put up. there were warehouses full of food and clothes, donated by people from the surrounding area. Menonites from Missouri came down and rebuilt the entire subdivision, free.

One year, almost to the day, after the tornado, the community has been rebuilt. Except for the Ito home. (the guy with the cars) They are leaving the empty slab as a sort of monument to the 43 people who were killed. It would have been a lot more, but the national weather service got the warning out within 30 seconds of the formation of the tornado, Amazingly fast for a federal agency. I watched the replay of the radar image, It was incredibly obvious that this was something truely nasty. The tornado formed out of a clear sky only 20 miles from the subdivision it destroyed.

That's so scary. Have you ever been IN a tornado?

No I haven't. In fact, that was as close as I've ever gotten to one. That is closer than I ever want to be to another one.

It must be utterly frightening. My sister has seen one too; she says she honestly thought she was going to die, and wrote me a letter.

Small ones aren't that scary, It's the big ones that are bad. When one is that big and your only transportation is a big truck, all you can do is watch and hope it doesn't come your way.

Then again, the same day, the same storm bred a small tornado that collapsed the roof of a large grocery store. But for the quick thinking of the manager, another 40 people would have been killed. The manager herded everyone into the meat locker, just before the tornado hit. It took the rescue people 3.5 hrs to get the door clear so they could get out, but, nobody was hurt.