By evening on the day Rita hit land, the remnants had made it up to my area in Arkansas. As tornado sirens went off, I went to the apartment below me. With nothing better to do, I called my family in Houston. So I sat up against a wall and listened to my mother complain about the power being off. The next door neighbor\'s fence had been blown over and a house down the street had a tree fall into their roof. Ironically, I was in more danger than they had ever been in. Eventually the storm passed me and everything was fine. My parents still had no power and it didn\'t come back on for several days. It turns out, my parents (my mom specifically) would not have made very good pioneers.