You know the saying, "April showers bring May flowers"? Kansas takes it seriously. Yesterday Laura and I were in the kitchen in the morning, and noticed how muggy and dark it was outside. Then both outside cats suddenly appeared at the back door, crying to be let in; not one minute later, the sky opened. It was as dark as just after sunset, rain came down in lashing pelts, and the winds had to be in the 60-70 mph range - I ran through the house closing windows, but Laura saw a 50 foot tall tree in our neighbor's back yard lose one of its big limbs. The rest of the trees swayed so much that at times they were nearly perpendicular with the ground. Then we had several minutes of heavy hail. Glorious thunder. After about seven or eight minutes, the wind died and the rain lessened, as the leading edge of the storm moved past, and we were in for several hours of steady, gentle rain.

IT WAS AWESOME.

Laura and I had errands to run, and as we drove we saw a lot of trees with downed limbs, a few that had fallen clean over, and a lot of wooden fences that were kaput. Parts of the city lost power, and let me tell you, six lane intersections should not rely on people understanding the rules for when the lights go out. However, we prevailed, and picked up Sherlock Holmes on DVD (yay!), exchanged media at the library (yay!), picked up a thin crust Mediterranean grilled chicken pizza to bring home and bake (yay!), and watched some Terminator and Caprica (yay!). Dinner with Grandpa, then we headed over to Cabela's, which is an enormous outdoor sporting store.

Laura and I have been talking about going camping since last summer but have never gotten around to it - we were in the clearance section and found two big mummy sleeping bags - as you can see from the link, these are quite pricy. We found two, both rated for 15 below zero, on clearance for 40 dollars apiece. One had a broken zipper, and they took off another ten percent. (Grandpa and Laura fixed the zipper with a pair of needle-nose pliers in about five minutes.) Now all we need for our planned-to-take-place-in-two-weeks camping trip is a hand-cranked LED lantern, a hatchet, some wasp spray, and...a tent. We have a tent, but it's super-old and not all that big. Our neighbors have an awesome, two-room tent but we're not sure about borrowing it, since they're way into camping and use it all the time, and I'd hate to damage it. Tents are expensive, and we're not likely to find one big enough for less than $150, which...no. I don't have that. So we're looking into that, because that's kind of a big part of camping.