Sunshine Alert

For the last few weeks my local news TV station has been pushing the bad weather alert app for my phone.  The free app sends me an audible and text alert when there is bad weather in my location, wherever that location happens to be.  After hearing over and over again how helpful it is to be warned of dangerous weather events I went ahead and put the app on my phone.

What a pain this has turned out to be.  Any time in the day or night my phone has spoken loudly and sternly to me telling me of a flash flood, big wind, falling tree or potential to be struck by lightening eminent event.  Even if my phone is on mute the sound overrides my requested silence sending warnings and beeps, flashes, speaks and spelling out life threatening messages.  I have been awoken a half dozen times.

Do you think waking me up in the middle of the night hearing that I need to go to a center-of-my-house-windowless-room and stay there until the all-clear alert is actually making me do it?  Hell no.  I lived in Washington DC when it was the murder capital of America.  I used to hear gunshots right outside my bedroom window regularly and I barely paused to think, “Should I roll off my bed by the window and sleep on the floor where I was protected by a brick wall?”  The answer to that question was always no.  I needed a good night’s sleep because I had work in the morning.  If I got killed in my sleep by a stray bullet at least my corpse would look well rested.

The way the biblical amount of rains have been this summer I don’t stand a chance to have a good night’s sleep if I keep this app, so I am going back to my ignorance is bliss way of life and removing it.  What I am really looking for is the “Sunshine Alert App” because I hate missing a moment of the rare and precious sunshine we might still get this summer.

I wish that I could search for apps under the category of “Good News Apps” rather than the “Impending Doom Apps” that seem to be the trend.  I’m sick to death about impending anything.  People worry way too much about what probably won’t happen and not enough about enjoying the good that actually exists in the world.  I’m keeping my eye out for the sunshine and the rainbows that will certainly come with it.  I’m going to do it the old fashioned way by looking up in the sky and enjoying the lack of any annoying beeping to let me know there is a rainbow.