High rise living=scary

Last night I thought I was going to die.  Sure, I've had this feeling before like the time photographer Shawn Pierce and I were covering a story in Podunk Indiana.  A father had killed one son, and tried to kill the other, and when Shawn and I were trying to get video, a woman pulled a shot gun on us.  Yep, she even cocked it, ensuring I was going to die in an Indiana corn field.  Another time when I was covering the arrest of an attempted murder suspect hiding in his baby mama's house, the baby mama came over and told me if her child was in any of the video, she'd personally find me and kill me slowly. 

Do you see why so many TV people are on Xanax?

Back to last night--most of the Midwest had really crappy weather, including tornadoes touching down in some areas.  As I was sitting in our high-rise (31 floors up), the building and our windows were swaying and shaking, the walls were creaking, even the pictures on our walls were moving.  Then the wind picked up our glass-top table on the balcony, lifted it up, and it came crashing back down.  Scary!

I suddenly wracked my brain, trying to remember if I'd ever covered a tornado hitting a city's downtown. Check!  Straight-line winds severely damaged the Regions Bank Building in Indianapolis a few years ago.

I kept asking myself, "What do I do?"  Stay inside the building and hope our glass wall doesn't shatter or go outside and risk being hit and killed by someone's breakfast table flying over their balcony.  I stayed inside.