Friday and a storm!

It was all sort of boring here again today, until about 6 PM. But lets start from the top. It was off to the barber shop this morning, as it had been four weeks or more since I had the last do.

I use the old fashioned red barber pole barber shop. Not the new ladies salon, that cuts men's hair. Or family salon, as they like to bill themselves. Us old guys wouldn't be caught dead in one of those places. LOL. Its a man thing, what can I say?

But from there, I came home for a little while and then it was off to the car dealership. It is more than 45 minutes thru the city streets to get from 135th North to 60th street where the dealer is located.

I decided to wait while they serviced the car. They have complementary computers, at browsing desks, so I read blogs for about two hours, while I waited. Not a total waste of time, as I would have read these anyway. I have been reading the archives of the Rex and Mary blog to learn more about the Laughlin, NV area. They have a series of blogs about the area.

It seemed a little dark in the South West, as I was driving back home, but I didn't give it much thought. I was watching the coverage of hurricane Ike on the TV when Loyce came home and wanted to know if I knew the sirens were blowing all over the South end of KC. Well, frankly, no!

So turning on the local TV channel and the ham radio brought me up to speed fairly quickly. I also watched the National Weather service radar on the laptop, and the storm was about 15 miles West of us. It had a tornado that touched down in the Town of Desoto. This is between here and Lawrence, which is quite close.

The TV has a chopper pilot the flys the chopper around the perimeter of these storms, with a camera mounted under its nose. The video is quite striking, and is live. Tonight, the actual tornado was rain wrapped, meaning you couldn't see the funnel as it touched the ground. The telltale sign, was the flashes of the powerlines as they were torn down and shorted together.

The damage was verified by the ham radio spotters on the ground. I never went to the basement, because we could see where the storm was located thanks to the radar image on the computer. This caused some excitement, none the less.

Tonight was ham radio club night, and I went anyway as the storm was playing out, but our president works for the National Wx Service, and of course he wasn't at the meeting. We only had 12 members but we had a brief meeting, and went to the pizza joint just the same. Some of the members that were participating in the emergency showed up at the restaurant after they stood down from the event.

My heart goes out to my neighbors that have damage to their homes tonight. It could have just as easily been us. This is Kansas, and it is still raining cats and dogs after midnight.