Significant Tornadoes, by Tom Grazulis

Man, what a busy day it has been! It’s amazing how occupied I can be without hardly budging from my La-Z-Boy couch. But then, my couch is as much my office as it is a piece of living room furniture. More, for that matter. With my computer keyboard in my lap and my screen parked on a stool to my left, here is where I earn most of my living as a freelance writer.

I’ve spent most of my day hammering out copy for a couple clients. I just finished a project a short while ago. I still have a chewy assignment that I haven’t even begun yet, but that can wait till tomorrow. This weekend will be a busy one, but in this tough economy, it’s great to have the work, and I can say in all honesty and with much gratitude that I have some truly wonderful clients. I am richly blessed, not just with consistent work doing what I love to do, but also with good relationships with people who, besides clients, are friends and brothers in Christ.

But the working day for me is over, and I am now turning my focus to other things. In my spare time, I’m acquainting myself with cPanel and–now that I can actually access the code–revamping the metatags for my Stormhorn.com website. The switchover from GoDaddy to Tablox as a web host, and from b2evolution to WordPress for blog software, has freed me up to take a more hands-on approach to my website and blog, and the next phase of the learning curve for this non-techie has begun.

And that’s just what’s happening on the sidelines. Today I went to the Hastings Public Library and picked up the copy I had requested of Significant Tornadoes, 1680-1981, by Tom Grazulis. It’s a formidable volume–the authoritative, exhaustive record of virtually every significant tornado in United States history that can be traced. Grazulis’s work is nothing short of remarkable, a real labor of love, and the result is a book whose poundage alone is enough to impress. This is one you want to load on a pack mule if you plan on taking it anywhere, but the information it contains is priceless.

And I need that information because I’ve been working on a book on the 1965 Palm Sunday tornadoes. I’ll tell you more about that some other time, but if you’ve followed this blog for a while, then you know that the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak has been a recurrent theme. There is a reason for that, and the time has finally arrived for me to do something about it. I wrote the prologue a couple months ago, and now, after a bit of a delay, I’ve written about two-thirds of the first chapter. I expect to have it completed within the week, and then it’s on to the next phase, which will consist of a fair amount of research.

And that’s enough on that topic. I’ve done enough writing for the day, and my bowl of cottage cheese and mug of abbey ale are demanding my attention.