ARCHIVES - 1996 to FOREVER

Oddly, they're a coupla energetic ugly old men... one short, one tall.

And a young supporting cast... at least they looked young. And gay, four out of the five of them, I believe. Not that I know from gay, but I just got that impression.

And Karen says that I'm wrong, so that's that, heh.

Before the show we went to eat at the buffet... Kim and Tom were going to meet us at 18:00, but they didn't show up, and Karen had left her phone at home. I had mine with me, though, but Karen couldn't get ahold of Kim, so we went on to the buffet. About the time that we were being seated, they came in.

They'd had a flat tire, and Tom was almost finished mounting the spare when it started pouring rain, so he got kinda soaked....

I got up kinda early today, for a Saturday, about 09:30, but I'd been awake since about 07:00. And I didn't accomplish anything useful at all, at all.

But still, it wasn't a bad day at all. We were supposed to get some rain, and we still might, but everything has missed us so far... they've had some golf-ball-sized hail up near KC, though. And it looks like another strong line might get us around 02:00 or so if it doesn't peter out before then.

We're used to the rain missing us, though. Something about Topeka... storms will come right up to Topeka and then split and go north and south of us, or sometimes just dissipate right west of here. And if there's a line forming, it forms just to the east of us and proceeds toward KC.

Although occasionally, we'll get one that forms right over Topeka and enlarges to the east and dumps a bunch of rain... that happens about once a year.

Which reminds me of a time when I was driving to Colorado, I was by myself going west and I saw something really odd... clouds forming out of nothing and scooting east. Fascinated, I watched for about an hour... there seemed to be a spot in the sky where the clouds majikally appeared, piling up to the east into huge thunderheads. I finally had to leave, but that was something that I'll always remember, that evening on the prairie.

It's not that I didn't know, intellectually, how clouds form... but I'd never seen it happen before, and it was fascinating.

It's a lot easier to see on radar, of course, and that's a common occurrence around here... one sweep of the radar, there's nothing there, the next sweep there's a little green, then more and more and then comes the red and orange....

There's a lot of technical talk involved, dry lines and the like, but there's nothing like actually seeing it happen. Just like movies of a tornado as compared to actually seeing one.