Cop Car's Beat

How it's been for the past few weeks

 

This morning, I could only tolerate working in the yard for 45 minutes - too darn hot! (Partly, I admit, because it turned out that most of the work that I had to do was pulling up large sumac roots that had revealed shoots since yesterday.) We're supposed to have some relief within another week. *Whew!*

Receding waters - mostly for Bogie

After the flood waters had receded, most of the water returning to within the creek's banks, I went out to take some photos - mostly to show Bogie since she had been here so recently. The scene in the first photo is mostly in Adam's (next door upstream) area. (The clearly visible lines in the grass are in our lot.) Adam's lot is at the confluence of a tributary, coming in from the near left of this scene, and the main creek that comes in from the far left. Taking the photo into the sun gave a wierdly-colored cast to the light in this photo.

On the opposite side of our yard are the steps that take one from the upper level of our back yard down to the floor of the woods. You can see the flotsam that has been left - clearly the least flotsam I've ever seen from flooding in our yard. I was amazed that the stack of stored concrete blocks was not visibly budged by the water flow. Possibly, this is due to Fred's immense pile of flotsam, hidden by the greenery to the left of the steps, that is still left from 2016. It may account for a slower flow of water in that immediate area.

The next photo shows the hostas, volunteer walnut trees (foreground), and "markers" in the area in which cats Cop Car and Jellicle are buried. Fortunately, as part of the mowing, I had cleaned out the tall grass from around this cluster just before the rain came.

Likewise, I had taken the wire caging and pulled the tall grass from around the struggling hostas that are a couple of feet away from the above cluster. These are the oldest hostas in our yard. (History: I had never found hostas particularly appealing until Bogie started posting photos of her hostas in her yard. I planted several in an area just downhill from the cluster of ash and cottonwood trees. Over the years, they got lost in the weeds and were mowed over several times. These two stalwart plants survived and, with the cluster of ash and cottonwood trees now having been removed, have a chance at long-term survival - if they have the lifespan.)

Bogie, the following photo shows what remains of the brush pile. Since the brush pile had been (mostly) cleared out by "my" tree guys last fall, what had accumulated since then hadn't had a real chance to settle in. I think that all of the pile on which you piled the windfalls while here was washed away and that what remained was an older part of the pile that the guys hadn't had time to haul away. In my next posting, you'll see the beginnings of my new pile - cherry tree limbs. It took a few more hours for the trapped water in this photo to completely drain away.

 

We've yet to see the end....

By 3am, yesterday, the creek was up at the edge of the "good grass" lawn area of our back yard. Since the water can rise faster than I can cope, I immediately threw a bunch of stuff into my car's trunk, doffed my nightgown in favor of pants and shirt, and awoke Hunky Husband so that he could do the same. Pleasantly surprising me, HH grasped my message immediately and started throwing his stuff together. I no longer recall the blog friend or family member who came up with the reminder a few weeks ago, but they should be credited with my thinking to include HH's and my prescription medications. By 3:30am, we were ready for hasty departure should the water reach the house.

We each tried to grab a nap, but I knew that HH would neither hear if we had another spate of heavy rain nor hear a struggling sump pump, so I never did drop off. It wasn't until about 9am that it became obvious that the water had stopped advancing and had started to recede. At that point, I took a few photos. It was a struggle for me since I hadn't used the camera in my iPhone, before, and my camera was packed in the trunk of my car. Below are a few of the iPhone photos that I've been able to transfer as JPEG files. The biggest problem I had was that I had taken only a couple of still photos. Most of my output was video, which I then had to transform into stills. (I'm not good at this!)

The first photo shows the section of our yard (on the near side of the fence and its extension) that is actually the closest to a creek bank. The creek rather wraps around our back lot's boundary, our lot extending 300 feet from the street on the left (southeast) side and 200 feet from the street on the right (southwest) side.

The next photo is just to the left of the above photo. The water had come just a bit further inland - surrounding the right-most small tree in the foreground.

As can be gathered from the lines in the mowed grass of the photo, below, this photo is looking nearly straight out from the back sliding glass door.

The next photo shows the part of our lot that is farthest out, approached by the normal bounds of the creek. At its maximum encroachment, the water came nearly to the post that supports the bluebird nesting box (just to the right of the far end of the fence).

Did we immediately unpack my car and go to bed? No. We did not. We are forecasted to have rain during five of the next six days and during 8 of the next 10 days. We haven't experienced as much flooding (so far) as in the past, but the ground is absolutely soaked and there is much rain for us yet to get through. We did get a good night's sleep last night, my having achieved at least eight hours' worth.

Note: HH just came in from his first walk in several weeks. He had made three or four false starts (I believe that each time, he had forgotten how to operate his "running watch with GPS" and had to return to refresh his memory by reading his notes on its operation.) When he finally succeeded, he walked his "usual" two miles (excluding the 1/3 mile warmup and 1/3 mile cooldown) and averaged just over 11 minutes per mile for the two miles. He says that his heart is alright. Good for him. I would be happy to see him get back into his walking/running exercise groove.

Oh, what fun

Average annual precipitation for the Wichita area is 34.31", according to the National Weather Service.  We fell far below that average during the last several months of 2021 and the first few months of 2022. We are making up for it. So far, this month (May), we have received 7.6" of rain, according to our rain gage - although, one night the wind blew the gage over, so we may be missing a bit. Tonight (May 31), we've hit the jackpot. We have received two spates of heavy rain. I don't know how much rain has accumulated in our rain gage, but I do know that when I was preparing to retire for the night - just before toddling off to our bedroom - I realized that the sump pump had been activated for a long while, perhaps a minute or two. That is not good!

Anytime we receive more than 0.5" of rain, I expect our sump pump system (a main pump powered by house wiring and an auxiliary pump powered by a battery) to activate. Our sump hole, in our mechanical systems "room", has three 3- or 4-inch inlets from the tiling that is laid along our foundation (at the bottom?) It is always the same inlet that supplies the majority, if not all, of the water that is routed to the sump. From observation and experimentation, I know that that particular inlet services the foundation to one side of our front porch - a run of about 35'. Tonight, when I went downstairs to check out the sump pump, I found that one inlet to be releasing a torrent of water into the sump, much like a firehose. It was obvious that the input rate was higher than the output rate of the pump. The poor pump was losing ground. I gathered a couple of small saucepans from the kitchen and a couple of 3-gallon plastic buckets from the laundry room that is next door to the mechanical systems room and set to work baling. Almost immediately, the depth of water in the sump reached the level at which the auxiliary pump activated. Even with both pumps working, they would have lost ground without intervention.

Our Working Space at the Sump Pump Installation

Anyone familiar with sump pump systems knows that an alarm starts screeching when the auxiliary pump kicks in. It is shrill! Hunky Husband and I donned the earmuffs that we wear to protect our hearing when using noisy equipment in the yard (mowers/string trimmers/hedge trimmers/blowers) and set to work.

Sump Pump System Installation Layout

For the first 30 minutes, I baled (mostly with the 1-quart saucepan, its being difficult to dodge all of the inlet ducts, control lines, and such) while HH carried the filled buckets to the laundry sink for disposal of the water. I found it more convenient to catch the water as it spewed from the inlet duct than to try to dip water. At the 30-minute point, we traded off. Since HH found it best (for him) to kneel on his knees instead of doing as I had done (sit on my butt on a thick folding of drop cloth), that didn't last long - especially since most of his height is from his waist up. It was really hard on him. Worse, when he tried to stand, he had difficulty. He tried grabbing onto an exposed stud with one hand and onto the main vertical sewer line with his other - to no avail. I was able to get him to scoot over to the carpeted hallway outside the mechanical systems room which allowed us room for me to brace my feet and help pull him up to his feet - wobbly, but upright. We went back to his toting and my baling. Within another 15 or 20 minutes, the water inflow had slowed just enough to allow me and the auxiliary pump to turn the tide. Eventually, the main pump shut off. I was amazed that it hadn't overheated with its having been continuously activated for so long. Since then, the main pump has done its usual thing of activating for several seconds and shutting off for a minute or two, depending upon rain conditions. This experience makes me happy that we installed a new sump pump system in January 2020, as posted.

P.S. I just went out to check our rain gage: 3.92", for a total of 15.32" in May. While out, I could hear that the creek is out of its near bank, just downstream of us. I'm just wondering if this will be the rain that puts us to the point where water reaches our house. We are in uncharted territory.

Miscellaneous

I was somewhat surprised, this morning, by two things: 1) HH and I had each had a good night's sleep, and 2) the radio station to which I "listen" all night (it helps me ignore my tinnitus and HH can't hear it) announced that it was snowing in Wichita. Surely enough, upon arising, I found that the world had developed a white blanket - and that big, fat snowflakes were (and are) still falling. Just yesterday I had heard a report about how, on average our temperatures are rising but that the occurrence of freeze-thaw cycles was increasing. The white blanket, once again, made it easier to see clumps of daffodils and narcissi.

A few years ago, I planted rings of daffodil bulbs around our newly planted pink-flowering dogwood trees, one ring of which is shown in the next photo.

Solution to a pressing domestic problem (possible TMI warning)

For the past 30 years, HH and I have followed the examples of our two sets of parents by maintaining separate bedrooms. No, we don't hate one another, but we are practical people. HH suffers from being cold nearly all of the time and I suffer from being too warm most of the time - in addition to which, we are both fitful sleepers who may gasp or snore. Separate bedrooms work and we've always known where to find one another in case of a low-hanky/panky warning light's illuminating.

But...things change. With that in mind, every few years I've given HH the option of sharing a bedroom. The answer had always been "No, thanks." until last Fall. Last Fall, mindful of HH's changing states of mind brought on by progression of his dementia, I asked again. He replied that it would "comfort" him to have the closeness. So I started spending my nights in his bedroom. What to do about the hot/cold difference? I sewed one of HH's heavy cotton/wool flannel sheets to one of my cotton broadcloth sheets, with the seam running down the centerline of each. The next photo demonstrates the placement of the sheets on the bed. As placed on the bed, HH has one layer of my sheet and two layers of his sheet over him while I have but the single layer of my sheet.

Depending upon the temperature, there is usually (at 72 degrees F in the bedroom) a light quilt atop the sheet that is shown. As the weather warmed up (it was 77 degrees F in the bedroom night-before-last), I sewed two of my sheets together in a similar fashion. With the newer sheet, HH has three layers of sheet while, again, I have a single layer.

This is a good compromise. I am usually a tad too warm, but not so warm as to be daunting, and HH is not freezing. (In my own bedroom, usually at 68 degrees F during the winter, I slept under but one sheet most of the time - two, when the temperature dipped a few degrees.)

Snowing & Blowing - redux

When I returned to bed at about 2:30am, today, there was a lot of thunder and lightning and rain and wind - and the temperature had fallen from 36 degrees (F) to 32 degrees (F) during the hour or two that I had been up - but, when Hunky Husband and I arose about 30 minutes ago, we were greeted by the forecasted snowing and blowing. Until late last night, I expected pretty much a repeat of the snow that we had received two weeks ago; but, just before I went to bed, the forecasters made it clear that, although the maps they were showing us of the different bands of snow depths expected closely mirrored the predictive maps of two weeks ago, this snow won't stick around for as long a time. The temperatures aren't expected to be as low.

Because of the wind, I chose to take photographs through our double-glazed windows rather than sliding the breakfast room door open. The quality of the photos suffers for it, but I didn't hear HH saying, "Shut the door!" I cannot explain the difference in color values on the snow of the first photo and the other two photos, but each photo was snapped through a different window. The first photo is pretty much down-wind looking at the area from which the big old cottonwood tree was removed in November.

The second photo shows the lea side of the house. A female Northern Cardinal is atop one of the birdfeeder poles. One of the Slate-colored Juncos on the ground is near a bush in the photo. The orange electrical cord at the bottom left is the power feed to the heated bird bath.

The viewing axis of the last photo is nearly perpendicular to the wind, as the neighbor's flags indicate.

In the above photo, the neighbor's tree silhouettes are missing one of their big old cottonwood trees. After our last snow, the neighbors had a tree removed. I assume that it had lost branches during that snowstorm and that more of the large limbs were a threat, possibly falling onto the house if the tree remained. Unfortunately, the photo that I had posted showing the flags following the last snowstorm did not extend far enough to the right (northeast) for comparison.

We are forecasted to receive a total of 6" - 9" of snow. I did think, last evening, to fill the bird bath with clean water and to take the "insides" out of the rain gage. The rain gage looks like we had already received about 1.5"-2" of snow when we arose. I have a medical appointment (draw blood for lipid panel, et cetera) that I may call to re-schedule, this morning. I don't really want all of the sugar from the upcoming snow ice cream to throw off my blood glucose reading ;  ) I notice that the snowflakes are now larger than they were when I snapped the above photos. The following photo shows some of the large flakes that have stuck to a kitchen window, but the falling of large flakes didn't last long. The snowfall quickly went back to small flakes. It's hard for large flakes to survive the wind.

Caught unawares

Our snow fell Wednesday and Thursday (February 2 & 3). Hunky Husband kept thinking that he saw footsteps in our back yard. My assessment was that he was seeing patterns in the snow caused by drifting. There was, after all, wind accompanying the snowfall for the last 20 hours or so, causing minor drifting. However, this morning when I went to the kitchen to prepare our lunch, I caught sight of the evidence of a massive invasion. The photo, below, shows the tracks of about 18 invaders - Wild Turkeys. We missed seeing them, this time, but they come down the street each morning, cutting through our yard to access the creek. The return journey is generally made each evening. I can only assume they had been hunkered down, as any reasonable turkey should have been, the previous two days.

The following photo shows how minor the drifting was against Adam's fence.

The force of the wind can be guestimated to be about 12 miles/hour by looking at the flags across the street from us.

ADDITION of 2/6/2022 - Attractions for birds

Partial Week in Review - February 2, 2022

Monday - Started off with a bang rattle

At about 11am, standing at the kitchen sink cleaning veggies, I heard the dishes in the cabinets rattle. The rattling pulsed for a total of about 22 seconds.

Other than the earthquake and a bit of cooking, my day was taken up finishing up the watering of trees and lawn (oh, and a bit of leaf raking). The weekend had provided us mild weather, allowing me to strike out against our drought conditions by watering newish trees and grass. I'm assuming that, although we have had temperatures in the single digits in November-January, the grass has not gone into dormancy since about 50% of it is still green. So far, the local water companies have not levied restrictions on water use, but we've had a total of less than 3/4-inch precipitation in the past three months, so I let established trees and plants fend for themselves.

Tuesday - Adventurous cooking

Tuesday is our preferred grocery pickup day. I had ordered two 1/2-gallon containers of milk and a 4-ounce bottle of vanilla extract to assure that we had sufficient ingredients for the snow ice cream I expected to enjoy. We were smack in the middle of the band of Kansas forecasted to receive 6-9 inches of snow, Wednesday and Thursday.

Among the items we brought home from the grocery store was a package of thick, boneless pork chops. I had really wanted lamb chops, but Dillons had none on hand and I didn't feel like making a run to Sig's butcher shop. I decided to try a new recipe (below) for making lamb chops, on the pork chops. (I don't recall the name of the source of the page shown. It was an unsolicited advertising publication.)

Girding my loins, I dived into making the chops for lunch. Immediately, I had to make a substitution - the only lemon on hand was not suitable and I didn't consider a lime to be a good substitute, so I used balsamic vinegar. Other than that, I followed the above recipe, using HH's 2019 Georges-Dubɶuf Beaujolais-Villages, his pre-dinner wine. It was a lovely meal, each chop complemented with a really small baked potato (with sour cream) and fresh cherry tomatoes.

ADDITION of a few hours later, because I forgot to include it the first time.

This is what the pork chops looked like while being cooked.

Wednesday - The white stuff came & Hair today, gone tomorrow

Snow: As usual, not being a good sleeper, I arose for a couple of hours in the early hours of Wednesday. It was snowing. It wasn't heavy, it wasn't blowing, it hadn't accumulated very much. By mid-morning, the wind had come up and although it didn't appear that we had received much snow, it had drifted a little. Our rain gage had trapped about four or five inches of snow. My attempt to take photos were met with a "Battery too low to take photos" message. The photos, below, were taken at about Noon. In the first photo, the rain gage is shown with the snow trapped inside. (I had removed the "funnel" and "measuring tube" to allow snow entry.) At 9pm, the depth of the snow in the rain gage was 8.5".

The second photo shows a pan of snow scooped up from the back porch for my Noon-time dish of ice cream. Each meal, that day, comprised a bowl of snow ice cream. Yum!

The snow was a skier's delight - dry powder. Fortunately, despite the wind, the snow is clean. It is late enough in the season that leaves and bits have already fallen from most trees. The snowfall was preceded by very light rain (think Seattle rain) for a few hours, knocking the dirt particles from the air and off of the trees. The snow kept well because the temperature was in the high teens (Fahrenheit).

Hair: (Important stuff - there will be a test - oh, yea.) The history of my life includes eras during which my hair was long, and eras during which it was short. Only because I could not maintain a schedule (from lack of proximity or lack of money) of having my hair cut often enough did I wander into a few weeks' time of wearing medium length hair - and during the two years that I lived in humid Florida. I wore long hair until age 14, short hair from then to age 31, long hair from then to age 57, short hair until COVID-19 made me too chicken to go to the hair cutting shop. It takes about one year for my hair to grow out so, now after two years in which to grow, my hair is long, again.

Early in the process of letting my hair grow out this time, and recalling that my Great-grandmother S wore her long hair up in a bun, I consulted Wonderful GrandDaughter (WGD) and Rachie. Being nurses, they have tended to wear their long tresses up in buns for the past several years. They are talented at making it look effortless, neat, and attractive. How did they do it? They told me. I practiced. I could never get the hang of it - until this past week. I got it! My bun looked effortless, neat, and mostly tidy. To memorialize the event and to be able to send them evidence of my feat (I cannot see them in person, after all), I had a passport-type photo taken at our local Walgreens (below). What an eye-opener. I shuddered looking at the too-honest photo. Obviously, WGD and Rachie looked wonderful in their buns because they are young and good-looking. Who would have thought?

I used the above photo to update the photo at the top of the blog page for a couple of days; but, Wednesday, I did something that I had not really been able to do, before. I took a selfie. It shows me with my hair down (below) and conforms more to the mental image I hold of myself. I may never be able to wear my hair "up", again!

Writing that last sentence reminded me that my mother had worn her hair in an "up-do" for some years in the 1940s and 1950s and that I had worn mine in an "up-do" on special occasions (photos of each, below). Had I remembered the photos of my own up-do in 1969, I might have been spared the trauma of going through my more recent up-do attempts. I must admit that the 1969 up-do had looked a lot better before the Kansas winds assaulted it.

  

                                                                                                                        December 1969

Wayback to 6/19/1992

My photo scanning efforts keep taking me back into the past. One of the sets of photos that I scanned, this morning, reminded me of an event on 6/19/1992: a huge hailstorm. The following entry is from Wikipedia.

19 June 1992

Wichita, Kansas, USA

Two batches of severe thunderstorms, occurring within 6 hours of each other, dumped hailstones up to 4.5 in (11 cm) in diameter across Sedgwick, including the city of Wichita, and surrounding counties in south-central Kansas. Over 10,000 homes were damaged. The hail left wheat fields in a near total loss. Estimated property damage totaled $500 million with crop damage at $100 million. The thunderstorm episode ranks as one of the worst ever to hit Kansas.[7]

Back Story

In early 1990, our son-in-law, WichiDude, contacted me to let me know that Cessna Aircraft (for whom I had worked 1975-1981) was hiring engineers. At the time, although Hunky Husband and I had remarried in 1988, I was still living in Albuquerque, NM (working in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA) while HH was in his 32nd year with Boeing. By late March, I was making the long drive from San Francisco to Albuquerque, pausing a bit in Albuquerque to process out of my job there, and making the long drive from Albuquerque to Derby, KS. I put in my (2nd) first day of work at Cessna on 4/9/1990. Well and good. HH and I were once again stuffed together into the house in the that we had had built in 1968 - which he still owned and had continuously occupied since that time.

Life is not that simple. Came May, 1991, Boeing sent HH to work in Philadelphia, PA. Fine lot of good it had done me, moving back to Kansas! The hailstorm hit while HH was working in Philadelphia.

Although I normally worked on the west side of Wichita, on the day of the storm I was working on the east side. Thus, my brand new 1992 Ford Taurus SHO car did not take the brunt of the hailstorm as did tens of thousands of cars that day. [The SHO required only the replacement of a small strip of weather stripping on one window - a $100 charge.] For years following the hailstorm, cars drove around our area of the country looking as though they had been systematically beaten with a ball pean hammer.

When I drove home from work a few hours after the storm it was a different matter. The streets, sidewalks, and yards of Derby looked as though they had received a few inches of green snow. The hail had shredded and beaten the leaves to a pulp, mixing them in with the ice of the hail. Some of the streets had been plowed and most of the ice had melted by the time I drove home. Below are more photos of our yard from that day.

In the photo, below, my tire tracks were made after the kind, younger couple who lived across the street (their house is shown in the photo) helped me clear the tangle of limbs that had blocked the drive.  (That kind gesture rather injured my feelings since I was a mere 54 years old at the time and felt perfectly capable of clearing the mess, myself. Rest assured, however, that I accepted their help graciously. Now, 29 years later, I would jump for joy at their help.)

The grass was surely green, but the photo (below) does not show it. The green on the ground in the photo is shredded leaves from our big, old trees. Note that our creek, running between our green yard and the house in the background, is high enough for the water to be seen. I take it that the lawn mower belonged to, and was in the yard of, our nextdoor neighbor. Our mower was in our shed.

Many of the trees along the banks of the creek lost limbs. The creek was overflowing, not only from the amount of water that resulted from hail melt, but also from the clogging of the waterway produced by downed limbs and trees and other debris from the storm.

I'll wind up the post by embedding a video shot during one of the storms that day. The video runs about five minutes, but only gets informative at about 50 seconds in. It appears to me that the videographer was fortunate in missing the brunt of the storm. (Street/highway signs make it easier to follow his path - if one is familiar with Wichita.)

"This video is part of the Tornadoes Kick Media stock video collection from Tony Laubach. To license this footage, please contact Tony Laubach at the email below or through YouTube or Facebook."

 

NOTES:

1. At the beginning of the day, all of the trees around our neighborhood were fully leafed out. It was the stripping action of the hail that bared the trees behind our house in the top photo.
2. In the same photo, to the right of the driveway and above the sidewalk one may see a patch of bare dirt. That is where I had a large maple tree removed just a few weeks before the hailstorm. It had suffered major damage in a windstorm.

Kansas has its own experience of earth, wind, & fire

Yesterday was something else in Kansas! It looked like the dust bowl as the howling winds lifted the dirt from eastern Colorado and western Kansas into the air, mixing it with smoke from numerous range fires, and slamming the particulates across Kansas and on into Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and beyond. We here in Derby were at the southern tip of the narrow band of storms that were basically aligned north-to-south, moving east at speeds faster than the highest legal land-based vehicle speed limit of 75mph. 

The tiny bit of rain that we received (0.14") was mostly dilute mud. Our windows are now grime streaked. (Some of the grimy streaks show in the photo, above - IF one clicks on it to enlarge the above image.) But, hey, we got off really, really easy. Some of the state is still dealing with prairie fires left over from yesterday - mostly caused by downed power lines. Some small power companies turned off the juice for a couple of hours to prevent more fires' being set.

Fires Remain a Concern Across Kansas After Strong Wind Storm

Firefighters and emergency responders are battling fires spreading across parts of central and western Kansas after a powerful storm blew through the state.

By Associated Press Dec. 16, 2021, at 9:17 p.m.

 

A calf grazes in a pasture along [sic] near a fire that burned 365,850 acres and stretched across Ellis, Russell, Osborne and Rooks counties

Thursday, Dec. 16, 2021, near Natoma, Kan. The fire was stoked by a storm that passed through the area Wednesday with high winds and gusts up to 90 mph.

(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

By MARGARET STAFFORD, Associated Press

Fires that erupted across Kansas continued to burn Thursday as the state responded to a wind-whipped storm that also churned up dust and reduced visibility for drivers, causing three fatalities.

Fires in 11 counties from Russell County west burned just under 400,000 acres, with about 365,850 acres in a fire that stretched across Ellis, Russell, Osborne and Rooks counties, said Shawna Hartman, spokeswoman for the Kansas Forest Service. Smaller fires were also burning in those counties and other areas.

The storm system on Wednesday carried winds that reached up to 90 mph in some areas. The winds combined with low humidity and dry vegetation and grasses to fuel fires in parts of western and central Kansas.

The dust reduced visibility on roads across the state, causing three fatalities, 20 injury accidents and 51 non-injury accidents, the Kansas Highway Patrol said.

While not at all comparable to the spate of tornados experienced by Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Illinois last Friday with the attendant deaths and destruction, this assault hit some of the farmers, hard. After evacuating to evade being trapped in the fires, themselves, some came home to dead and dying animals and destroyed buildings and equipment.

Most of Kansas is in drought conditions. According to my records from our own rain gauge, we received only 0.5" of rain in the first 12 days of November, and nothing after that until the 0.14" last evening.

BTW: The above Associated Press article says that winds reach 90mph. According to the weather service reports, there were spot reports of winds' reaching over 100 mph. I believe that the highest report was 107mph. The 250 miles of I-70 from Salina KS to the Colorado border was closed in both directions for some time to get high profile vehicles off of the Interstate. Too many semis were being blown over.