The weather here may seem boring to those who are acquainted with other climates. It gets neither too warm nor too cold. Rain is limited to the relatively short rainy season. Humidity is minimal. Snow is so extremely rare that I can remember it only once in the Santa Clara Valley during my lifetime, and it was only half an inch deep. Tornadoes are about as rare, or at least they were. I can now remember two here, which is twice as many occurrences of snow that I can remember. Shortly after half past one last Saturday, rain, which had been falling for a while, suddenly became torrential, then instantly stopped, then instantly became torrential again. I stepped outside with Rhody to observe, and noticed Heather, Rhody’s feline ‘associate’ who prefers to stay inside during such stormy weather, had also come outside to observe, and was staring to the south. When I looked to see what she was looking at, I saw that not only were dark clouds speeding to the east, but that a portion of them was backtracking, as if swirling. My comment to Rhody and Heather was something like, “Well, at least tornadoes do not happen here.”. A few minutes later, a tornado did happen, right on Target, literally. It landed right on the Target store in Scotts Valley, less than two miles away. It was rated as an EF1 tornado, which apparently means that it was rather minor. It lasted for five minutes, though, while travelling only about a quarter of a mile. That is much slower than the clouds that we observed only a few minutes earlier. Fortunately, injuries were minimal, although a few cars were tossed. Utility cables, streetlamps and traffic signals were thrashed. So was much of the vegetation of the urban landscape.