There's no place like home ... There's no place like home

It was quite a Monday in Omaha.

On Monday afternoon we took a ride by Rosenblatt Stadium, which appeared mostly intact from the outside but surrounded by a fence to keep curious folks like me out. Zesto's was doing an OK business, but nothing like during the CWS days.

Then we went to the Riverfront Park area, where the Missouri River is flooding. The water is up over a portion of the bank, so the walking trail closest to the river was closed.

It makes the Reedy River flooding Cleveland Park in Greenville look like a leaky faucet by comparison.

While standing in line talking to an Omaha native prior to Sunday's USC-Texas A&M game, one of the locals told us the melting snow from Montana hasn't gotten here yet. I guess things could be worse.

For supper, we ate at Piccolo Pete's steakhouse. The meat was exquisite. I love Waffle House hash browns, but they don't come close to Piccolo Pete's.

Just as we were paying the bill, they announced that the tornado sirens were on and we could be led to shelter if we desired. We hung around a couple of TV's watching the weather updates for a half-hour or so until we felt it was safe to leave.

In talking to a local during that half-hour, he said the last big tornado to hit Omaha was in 1975.

That jogged my memory. I was covering the College World Series for The Greenville News that year and would sometimes ride from the media hotel downtown to Rosenblatt with one of the NCAA representatives.

We passed a service station - probably on 13th Street - and the guy pointed it out. He told us a tornado had hit the area a few weeks prior. He said some poor soul climbed on the service station's roof to see how close the twister was - and was carried away by the tornado. I don't know if it was true or something he made up to amaze us rube Southerners, But It worked.

Back to the present: We didn't see any funnel clouds and eventually got back to the hotel without incident.

I was keeping up with the Florida-Vanderbilt CWS game/delay on Twitter and Facebook. Brad Senkiw of The Anderson Independent-Mail had the best line I saw. To paraphrase, he wondered if the tornado carried him off to Oz, would it be like the movie or the TV show.

The next-best line came from USC pitcher Patrick Sullivan. He tweeted there were about 100 people crammed into a 25-foot "safe room" during the tornado threat and an older gentleman "ripped one."

Weather permitting, it's back to the ballpark on Tuesday.