Thunderstorm and tornado season have begun again, and I find myself quietly rooting for a near miss. Ideally something dramatic—maybe golf-ball-sized hail or a small tornado that wanders into my neighborhood, looks around, shrugs, and takes a swipe at my roof before heading off to terrorize someone else.

No, I’m not one of those storm chasers who grew up traumatized by a childhood tornado that carried away the family home and a beloved sibling. My sister is still here on the ground. In fact, she lives in a house without a basement, which I worry about every spring when the weather starts getting nasty.

My motivation is much simpler. I have a leaky roof, and I am too cheap to pay the full cost of replacing it myself. So, each year when storm season arrives, I find myself hoping that Mother Nature will step in and assist with the financing. The ideal scenario is a storm that damages the roof just enough for the insurance company to cover it—but not enough to damage the rest of the house, or more importantly, me.

It’s a delicate risk-reward calculation. But I invest in the stock market, which goes up and down like a playground seesaw based on whatever headline appears that morning, so I’m already comfortable with irrational gambles.

What makes this especially odd is that my mother raised us to fear storms the way medieval villagers feared dragons. Whenever dark clouds appeared, she would herd all of us kids into the basement like livestock and we would stand there trembling while the wind howled and tree branches flailed around outside like they were auditioning for a disaster movie. We waited for Armageddon.

Armageddon never showed.

The closest we came was during the terrible spring of 1973 when a supercell outbreak of tornadoes hit northern Kentucky and southern Ohio. We nervously peeked out a basement window and actually saw a small tornado in the distance. It didn’t destroy anything dramatic. The only visible result was that a fishing boat from a nearby lake had somehow been relocated into a horse pasture.

The horses seemed unimpressed.

Despite surviving my mother’s tornado drills, I have managed to flirt with danger in other ways, most of them involving large automobiles.

When I was growing up in Kentucky, we had large family reunions, which as a child I described as “fun,” though in hindsight they were mostly a chaotic combination of cousins, overcooked hot dogs, mountains of dessert, and enough soda to give a small boy permanent caffeine tremors.

There was also a keg of beer.

My father never strayed far from the keg, and when it came time to leave, he walked with the wobbly determination of a newborn colt. My mother didn’t drive, and none of my brothers had licenses yet, so we all climbed into the car and began the tense ritual of searching for the seat belts. These were normally ignored, but family reunions were considered special occasions that warranted digging into the seat and finding them, like a lost treasure.

The drive home was always harrowing. The car drifted gently from one side of the road to the other until the tires hit gravel along the edge, producing a loud rumbling vibration that alerted my father that he had left his lane and he recorrected until we hit the other side. Us kids were huddled in the back of the station wagon, saying our Hail Mary’s, and hoping we saw our next birthday.

Looking back, this was basically an early version of the Lane Departure Warning System that modern cars have today. If only I had patented the technology, I would now be a very rich man.

Occasionally my father’s Lane Departure system failed, and he would take out a neighbor’s fence. Once he even took out our own fence, which seemed unnecessary. The next day he would be out there repairing it while drinking a beer, which was simply how he rolled. Pop open a beer, and ger ‘er done. We aided him during the reconstruction efforts, like nurses aiding a surgeon. “Hammer” he would say, and we dutifully place a hammer in his hand. God forbid if he asked for a 5/8 socket, I was just in the 3^rd grade, and we hadn’t covered fractions in school yet.

Most of the accidents weren’t too serious, but he did roll a VW bus once. He was driving alone at the time and claimed he was dodging a wrench in the road, though later I wondered why a wrench would cause you to veer off the road. There were no witnesses to confirm the wrench story or whether alcohol was involved. But if the day of the week ended in “day,” it was a strong possibility.

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and unfortunately that proved true.

As a senior in high school, I was obligated to attend Senior Skip Day at Big Bone Lick State Park, which sounds like the punchline to a crude joke but is in fact a real park in Kentucky.

The picnic was wonderful because it involved girls and alcohol—my two favorite hobbies at the time. Unfortunately, it started to rain, so I headed home in my sweet baby-blue Chevy Vega with four on the floor.

On the way home I took a curve a little too fast for the rainy conditions and slid off the road. My tires were technically tires, but only in the sense that they were round and attached to the car. In terms of traction, they had about as much tread as a baby’s bottom.

Fortunately, no one was hurt and the car seemed fine, so I drove home.

Later I discovered that the radiator hose had been knocked loose and all the coolant had leaked out, causing the aluminum engine block to overheat and crack. This ended the life of my beloved Chevy Vega and, more tragically, my ability to drive to school.

For the final month of my senior year, I had to ride the bus.

No humiliation known to mankind compares to a high school senior stepping onto a bus filled with underclassmen. I still have nightmares about it.

Vehicles, however, were only the beginning.

Over the years I have taken many unnecessary risks, most of them involving fire or power tools—the two things men love to play with even though history has shown repeatedly that we probably shouldn’t.

When I was a teenager working at Moore’s Orchard, the tractors and farm equipment were ancient relics that looked like they had been manufactured sometime shortly after the Civil War. When something broke, we hauled it to the shed and attempted repairs using an acetylene torch.

One day I struggled to light the torch. On about the fifth try it finally ignited—or more accurately, exploded—into a bright blue fireball because I had left the gas line open for three minutes while fiddling with it.

I slowly picked myself up off the ground and noticed a burning smell. All the hair on my left arm had been singed off, and my left eyebrow looked like it had been attacked by a tiny flamethrower.

Fortunately, hair grows back.

My relationship with tools has not improved with age. Whenever my wife asks me to do a simple project, I immediately interpret this as permission to buy a new tool.

“Could you get rid of that small tree?” she’ll say.

Ten minutes later I’m in the car heading to Lowe’s to purchase a chainsaw.

Over the years I have accumulated drills, sanders, circular saws, miter saws, jig saws, scroll saws, table saws, and a drill press. At this point Lowe’s is basically just storing tools there until I pick them up.

There is also enough sawdust in my workshop to safely cushion an entire museum exhibit of Ming dynasty vases.

I have not yet lost a finger, although whenever I buy a new power tool my wife quietly asks if my life insurance is up to date.

Recently I had an incident with a sander.

You might think a sander is harmless. It is not. I was sanding a piece of wood and applying what could generously be described as excessive enthusiasm when the internal spring mechanism suddenly exploded. Pieces of the sander shot across the garage like mechanical shrapnel.

Luckily, I was unharmed, aside from my dignity.

Naturally, I went straight to Lowe’s and bought another one.

Oddly enough, my most serious tool injury didn’t involve power tools at all. It involved a cheese grater.

I love carrot cake, and I was happily shredding carrots when I lost focus for about half a second. In that half-second I managed to shred the skin off part of my hand.

My lack of concentration around sharp objects is troubling.

At our Christmas party this year I was slicing lemons for cocktails and accidentally sliced my finger wide open. But the party had to go on, so I finished making the drink and then asked my wife to find a bandage.

When she asked why, I simply held up my hand and let the blood speak for itself.

On the bright side, I did invent a new cocktail that evening.

It’s called the Bloody Old-Fashioned.

So yes, I have a habit of living on the edge—or as my wife describes it, “doing stupid things.”

Which brings us back to storm season.

Whenever dark clouds roll in, I find myself quietly coaxing the storm a little closer—but not too close—in hopes of the perfect near miss that will justify an insurance claim for a new roof.

So far the storms have only given me a swampy backyard and a lot of fallen trees.

But on the positive side, it did give me an excuse to buy a new chainsaw.

And this time, I promise I’ll try to focus when I use it