Awesome Beauty & Destruction

Wednesday night, July 8, 2009 I stepped out on my front porch to check on something and noticed the beautiful cloud to the north. I went back inside and got my camera to take the following shots...
...walking out in my yard to see the rest of the cloud I see this to the west...

...Fluffy white clouds on top with the brilliant orange from the sunset...

...the south end of the west cloud had straighter lines...

...in the darker blue/gray area on the horizon, lightening was visible...

...click on any of the pictures to get a larger view.

After taking the pictures I go back into the house to look at them on the computer. While sitting there I see the radar screen on one of the TV stations with the weatherman interrupting the scheduled programing. I turn up the volume and hear that Wichita is getting pelted with huge hailstones. These were coming from this beautiful cloud that I was taking pictures of...

July Hail Storm Slams South-Central KS

A summer thunderstorm slammed south-central Kansas on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Here are some of the more spectacular hail reports...

9:29 p.m. -- baseball-sized hail reported two miles southwest of downtown Wichita; car damage.

9:30 p.m. -- baseball-sized hail reported in downtown Wichita; damage to many vehicles at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium, where a crowd of more than 4,000 people was attending the Wichita Wingnuts baseball game; windows broken out; hail fell for about a half hour.

10:10 p.m. -- tennis ball-sized hail reported two miles east-southeast of downtown Wichita, near the College Hill neighborhood.

See complete article here.

Rainy Days & Wichita Eagle Newspaper

Rant coming... I guess the person that delivers my Wichita Eagle Newspaper disregards ANY memos from the newspaper office. My paper is STILL being tossed on the drive! A couple days ago it was in a plastic bag in the middle of the drive, a knot tied in the end of the bag and the paper was soggy inside. I would have taken pictures but I was busy with the 4th of July.
This is yesterday morning's paper. This time it's not in the middle of the drive, but still wet because it's not in plastic.

This morning it was in the middle of the drive and not it plastic but my husband heard the thunder and went out to retrieve it before it rained. Sidewalk art is fleeting...

I'm glad I got pictures of these before the rain.

A small defense to the paper not being in plastic, even I didn't think it was suppose to rain this week. Here's a picture of the radar yesterday morning...

See that small line of storm clouds? We were in that....

My gardens and yard are loving this, but so is the grass and weeds in my gardens. My little tiller doesn't work well in the mud. I may have to do all the weeding by hand if this keeps up. Mind you, I'm not complaining, anytime I don't have to water I'm a happy camper. :)

See the water sitting in the driveway in the picture above? And this was really a great deal of rain. It doesn't take much to fill my drive.

Wow! Have I got some catching up to do!

I've been so busy that I haven't posted in over a week! I've taken pictures during that time, though, so I'm going to play catch up and post from those pictures now. I'm going to back date the posts for the days they were taken, so scroll down to catch up on the events of last week. :)

Small Town Snapshot Sunday #5

I'm a couple days late in getting this posted, but here it is...

Wendy at On the Front Porch hosts Small Town Snapshot Sunday. Check out the other participating bloggers on Wendy's blog, then join us and post one of your own!

The 4th of July is when the family gets together at my house and we spend the time in my yard celebrating being with family. We also do unusual things like plop an old couch in the front yard to sit on. Here are all my grandchildren that were able to make it here this year.

And this is what they usually look like....
The Princess is getting to be quite an artist...
I think the heart says "You Rock Dad" but I'll have to ask the Princess to be sure.
This airplane was colored in by the youngest grandson, but his daddy did the outline.

Independence Day 2009!

July 4th is when the family gathers at my house.

The grandchildren make full use of the pool, keeping cool on the hot July days.
My son-in-law is our grill chef and this year they had a new grill to use with our grill that we got last year.

Friday night we had rain. It started out nice and gentle. It came and went, came and went. Later it came down heavier and around 4:30 or 5am my campers all came inside to sleep. The tent below caved. These tents are just NOT designed to deal with anything but nice weather.

My handyman son and I had stayed up cleaning up the studio and making it ready to use, but the campers didn't know this. Here you can see that we later set up a table and chairs and the grandchildren ate their breakfast in the studio. They were really enjoying the shade in the backyard too.

Time for fireworks and getting them all sorted and divided out. See the large red package in the center of the table? That's 4,000 firecrackers in 4 bundles. These were set off all at the same time, 4 people lighting one each of the bundles. I was in the house when this was done and it sounded like it went on forever.

When I went outside the street was cover with what looked to be little pieces of red tissue paper. Click on the picture below and look at the street. This is what it looked like for at least a block.

The sil got out on the street with a broom and cleaned this all up before it had a chance to blow anywhere. This picture may look a bit blurry because I was experimenting with the settings on my camera. This picture was taken after sundown without a flash. I was trying to remember the settings for taking pictures of fireworks.

I am attempting to put the slide show for my fireworks in this post. If the slide show doesn't work I may have to post it by itself.

Slide Show Removed and posted individually on July 7

After the fireworks the big "boys" got down to the games on the side of the house. I sat back at the firepit and help the grandkids make s'mores.

Here's a flash photo of the outside theater from behind the firewood pile.

We had a wonderful 4th of July, even with the rain interrupting out sleep.

Arts/Crafts Studio & Digging Ditches

The son is on vacation and he's spending the most of that working on my Arts/Crafts Studio. He's installed a back door that will give me access to my showerhouse.
Here's a look at the inside with the back door open, this increased the airflow drastically.

The next big improvement was to run power out to the studio. To bury the line we had to dig a ditch 2 1/2 ft deep.

We used the tiller to loosen the dirt and then the grandchildren helped to scoop it out.

Later that night, the ditch is much deeper and I have different grandchildren helping.

Working hard, but will pose for a photo.

My son adjusting the belt on the tiller.

There was a point when we had to stop using the big tiller because the guard was rubbing against the walls.

I have a tiller attachment for my weedeater, that's it on the ground to the left, that we used to loosen the ground dig out but we hit a point where we weren't making any headway because the ground was so hard. My son called a friend and he and another friend came out to help dig. If the friend hadn't come out it would have taken us forever to finish. But as you can see, the conduit is down and ready for wire.

If you look closely at the middle of the picture you will see one of the friends on the ground putting conduit into the bottom of the studio.

This is what he was working on...

At the house end the conduit is propped up out of the ditch...

Here's my son and the friend getting the box ready to go on the wall.

Here's the two workers that were up all night with me filling in the trench. The younger one couldn't believe he's stayed up all night. He said he's never done that before.

Here's the box all hooked up to wire but no power yet.

By light of the next day the trench is filled back in...

Though it was quicker and easier than digging it out it was still a lot of work!

A few days later we had power out the to the studio!

Small Town Snapshot Sunday #4

Wendy at On the Front Porch hosts Small Town Snapshot Sunday. Check out the other participating bloggers on Wendy's blog, then join us and post one of your own!

Saturday was Merchants Night in our small town. We had a Sidewalk Craft Fair!

There were wonderful wooden items for sell, all handmade.
I even had a table set up to make and sell custom buttons. Here you see the Princess sitting in my chair.

Up on the other side of the street an open air eating place was set up serving BBQ.

Our local merchants along the street also had their shops open.

There was suppose to have been a bike ride, but it was cancelled due to the heat. So, I let the kids take pictures with my old camera and they got some quite interesting shots...

...Up the street at Ye Olde Bank and Antique store.

Here's PK pulling a K-Monster and mugging for a self portrait.

The Princess decorating the bikes before finding out that ride was cancelled.

The kids talking to some other bike riders.

When I was getting my things set up I made up this button to make sure all was working.

Another type of self portrait...

Well I hope you had fun looking at the pictures of my grandkids having fun. They had fun taking the pictures.

June 24th Ballgame

This was the grandson's last game. The son and dil were both working again so I took him, his sister's and cousin, K-Monster, to watch him play. Because if the high heat I decided to watch the game from "outfield" this time, where the shade is. For warm up the boys even came to the outfield this time. See the diamond off to the left, over where the light pole is, that's where we usually sit.
Here the coach gave them their pep-talk.

The boys were getting lined up to bat...

This is the camera off zoom to give you an idea of how far away we were.

Here he is up to bat...

....and then in the outfield.

...a long shot of the game. If you click on the picture you can see better what's going on.

Our boys took the lead right from the start.

Here was a home run...

...and here is that same boy, exhausted, after running the bases.

Grandson batting, I think he actually tipped the ball on this one, but still no hit.

Here's a couple of our boys runs where one runner almost overtook another.

End of the game, final score was 11 to 5, our win.

The boys were ALL given medals...

And here's the team shot...

Great Games! Great Fun, Boys!

Gotta thank K-Monster for these last two pictures. He ran over to where the team was, half-way there he came back and got the other camera out of the car, and got the pictures. I wouldn't have had a team photo if he hadn't done that! Way To Go, K-Monster!

My Stats

This morning I was checking my stats and was shocked to find over 370 hits on this blog. If you look at the chart below which summarizes the year you'll see that most often I have less than 50 hits per day. More often around 30, if that. The spikes that you see are times that I have asked for responses from one or more of the email lists that I am a member of.
So why the high number the other day? Sunday I posted the Wichita Eagle article about Chase Kear. Yesterday Yahoo featured the article in their Yahoo news. When people googled information that was in the article, my blog was in the search list. I'm still getting quite a few hits from it. :)