Kansas heat, but not home bound.

Its been hot here...  Not hot by Arizona standards, but the Midwest humidity tends to make the normal mid 90s figures feel so much more hot...

Yesterday as I arrived home from the mornings motor cycle excursion, it was 94 on the dash of the motorcycle. But coming inside to look at the humidity recorded by my weather station, I found the reading to be 80 percent.....   So I looked on the heat index chart and found 129 degrees.... extreme danger, in vivid red color on the chart....

We had met for a Goldwing club breakfast in the small town of Louisburg, Kansas about 15 miles South of me here in Overland Park...  There might have been 40 or more of us at a long table, with everyone gabbing all at once....  But then we adjourned to the farm of one of our member's brother..

This farm is only an acreage of about 30 acres, with a tree lined lane and big white house...  The yard was green and the sweet corn crop stood beyond picnic tables under the trees...  In the back, rows and rows of vegetables were ripening in the 90 degree sun..  But that wasn't why we came...

Back behind the machine shed were neatly lined rows of Blackberry bushes...  About 5 acres of them..   Folks armed with white plastic ice cream buckets were madly picking the ripe berries for $5 a quart...  Of course the buckets held about a gallon or more..  So I dutifully joined the folks in the hot rows of bushes....

I picked about a quart, and couldn't take the heat any more....  But then I went over and got 6 ears of corn from the fellow on his quad ATV...  The ears were snapped off of the stocks and handed to me....   Would that be fresh?  So now you know why I was so intent to get back inside the air conditioning here at home....

I spent the afternoon making Blackberry freezer jam...  It will keep for a year in the freezer and it won't last anywhere near that long before its gobbled up....  Just for grins, I added some Jalapeno pepper juice buzzed by blender...  So I really have Blackberry Pepper Jam...  Oh and I made it sugar free too....

It has been a busy week of motorcycle events...   Tuesday we traveled to Tonganoxie, Kansas for a cafe on the main street.   This building had a rustic interior with corregated steel sheeting for walls....
Then on Wednesday we met a dozen or more riders at the Gardener, Kansas Mc Donalds for a trip out to Osage City..   That's about 70 miles West of my home here...  Somehow we ended up back in Lawrence for ice cream cones at a local Burger King....  That was almost a 200 mile day...

Then on Friday, I rode by myself down to Parker, Ks about 50 miles South of here...  That was for a 9 AM breakfast, so I left about 7:30.  It was cool that early, but the trip back with several friends was in the 90 s again...   I sat in the Mc Donalds here South of the house for about 2 hours drinking Iced Tea with one of the guys after that one...  It was hot.

Needless to say, the motorcycle has been parked today... The outside temp is 95 and I haven't bothered to look at the humidity or heat index, but the AC hasn't shut off for several hours.....  Life in the Kansas summertime..

Retired Rod