High Plains Panhandler

A Panhandle Storm

Last night a pretty monstrous storm blew through town. Even CNN has a story about it.

I am a stupid person. Yesterday right before I left work I checked WeathermanX to make sure no storms were coming. I had heard that morning that there was a 60% chance of thunderstorms. We seldom get those kind of odds with rain. Usually it's 100% chance of wind.

Radar looked okay, but you never know around here. Things pop up pretty quickly in the sky over the Panhandle. Sometimes no surprises are the best surprises.

I took my bike out for a little ride, thinking I'd work on hills today (yes, we have hills. They're nasty things, buried deep in canyons). I rode out about four or so miles and noticed a long, black wall of clouds a few miles north of me (you can see a long way here). No problem, I thought. The wind is coming in from the south, so those clouds will blow away in no time. That very thing happened the other day, so I figured I had this meteorological stuff down cold.

How wrong I was. I climbed out of a steep grade and noticed that the wall of clouds, instead of being pushed back to the north, was pretty much right behind me. Looming over my head was one of those flat, frisbee shaped clouds, the kinds aliens like to hide behind. The wind was whipping pretty quickly all around - every direction had a headwind to it. Bad mojo was starting to happen, so I banged those pedals of mine pretty hard to get home.

I made it a few minutes before the tornado alarms started blaring. Trust me, that's a scary sound.

This is where I became stupid again: I turned on the TV to check the weather in front of the kids. When Colleen heard the weather guys saying they had spotted a few tornadoes north of town, she started wailing and screaming. Megan joined in. Alex ran to the window and pushed his nose to it.

Suzanne came home a few minutes later. She had been at her book club but after a few minutes of that she decided to head on home. I'm very glad she did because right when she came through the door the hail started.

This wasn't your run-of-the-mill hailstorm. We've been through plenty of those. This time softball-sized chunks of ice started dropping from the yellow turbulence over us, slamming into the roof and windows as if they were little shrunken heads of concrete. We watched hundreds hit the grass in the backyard, bounce about 10 feet, and then hit hard again. Alex, of course, was pleasantly surprised by the drama, and he ran outside to pick up some of the hail. I grabbed him quickly because a concussion was an inch away and dragged him back inside.

"Cool!" he said.

Suzanne calmed the now completely freaked out girls. That was a difficult job because you couldn't hear anything in the house. The hail and rain and lightning and thunder and wind were so loud you had to yell to outshout them. Then the power went out, so we made a big deal of it with candles and flashlights. When we did that, everyone had a fun time (this morning, Megan asked for the electricity to go out again so we could read by candlelight tonight).

In the end, though, we came out of it all just fine. A few friends of mine had their windshields smashed by the hail, and everyone I know with a skylight now has a gaping hole in their roof. Our vegetable garden doesn't look too good, but those plants are hearty. I'm sure they'll make it. Tree limbs are down all over town, but the temperature for the first day of summer is now a nice 68 degrees.

That's perfect bike riding temperature. I just have to watch the wind.

Incredible Edible Insects

Today we went to the Incredible Edible Insect Event at Wildcat Bluff Nature Center, which is right on the border of town and no-town (Amarillo is interesting like that; there is a distinct line that separates Petsmart, Home Depot, and Kohls from Cows, Fields, and General Nothingness. The Nature Center straddles that line). I'm on the board of directors for the nature center, recruited for my "wacky, creative ideas." Unfortunately I haven't had any of those ideas yet, but no other board members have yelled at me, so I feel pretty safe in my position of nature center omnipotence.

The Incredible Edible Insect Event is one of our ways of getting people out to the nature center. The other day I was putting up flyers for the event around the office and a woman sitting in the waiting area by the receptionist's desk told me that the nature center was terrible.

"Really?" I said. "Why do you say that?"
"I was out there with some kids and we dug up a bone in some sand," she said. Her face was pinched, as if she had been sucking on a lemon all morning. "And then someone got bit by a bug."
"Well," I said, "nature does have that bug problem."
"And they don't have air conditioned trails! They have those at other places."
"Like the mall?" I asked. Alas, my satiric tone held no sway with her.
"Don't go there," she said. "It's bad."
Obviously she had forgotten that just two minutes before I had said I was a board member of the nature center.
"I'd help if they had a rollarcoaster," she continued. "And a snack bar with ice cream."

Then she drove off in her SUV, a cloud of gray exhaust lingering behind her.

Okay, I made up the part about the SUV. I think it was a Hummer.

Back to the insects. The kids were very excited that Suzanne and I had promised to eat some bugs in front of them. They couldn't wait to get their insect tattoos and start shoveling crickets down our throats, but once we got into the insect eating room all that changed. The kids didn't care about us. They wanted all the protein for themselves.

Our first stop was the Mealworm Fried Rice. The volunteer behind the table served us up with a few heaping tablespoons of fried rice chock full of mealworms and crickets. Of course, it looked disgusting, but that didn't stop everyone from diving in. I couldn't believe it. Alex, Megan, and Colleen had cleaned their bowls by the time I got up enough courage to sample a tiny spoonful. Even Suzanne beat me to it, eating her rice, worms, and crickets with gusto.

Alex, Colleen, and Suzanne went to the insect petting zoo next while I split off with Megan, the self-proclaimed Nature Girl. Our next stop was the Six Legged Tossed Salad. This is where you get some lettuce, some dressing, and some cricket croutons. Megan passed on the dressing for her salad and then, without pausing, dug through the lettuce, picked out the crickets, and popped them in her mouth like M&Ms.

"Ummm, tasty!" she said.

Suzanne gave Megan a Rice Creepy Treat that had several crickets mushed onto the top of it. A few loose ones fell off, but Megan, ever industrious, picked them up and placed them back on the Rice Crispy square before eating it. Apparently she wasn't going to miss out on anything.

All three kids went back several times for more Candy Worm Apples and Chirpy Chex Party Mix, but the big hit of the day were the Chocolate Chirp Cookies, which were brownie squares topped with crickets. Mine easily had 12 crickets on a two-inch square brownie. I took a long, hard look at that brownie, and then, when I realized the kids were giving me a long, hard look, I shoved the entire thing in my mouth. It had a dark delicious flavor topped, and every time I bit down and heard a loud crunch I tried to pretend it was just the nuts, but I knew it wasn't.

It took the rest of the day, with much flossing, to finally convince me that I didn't have all sorts of bug parts stuck in my teeth.

Later, at dinner, Megan refused to eat her green beans.

"Megan," I said. "You ate a garden full of bugs at lunch today. Now you won't eat your green beans?"
She looked at me calmly. "I'm the nature girl, not the green bean girl."

It's tough to argue with that one.

Wonderland

Every so often the members of Suzanne's Mom's Club bring out their families for a night out at Wonderland, a narrow strip of amusement park next to the drive-in and frisbee golf course. Mom's Club gets a price break on tickets, and usually when we go the crowd is pretty sparse (Crowds usually show up Buy One, Get One Free Sunday Night. These nights are scary because an awful lot of people show up with a distinct lack of supporting undergarments - on rollarcoasters!)

This time we gathered the Mom's Club group all together, and Suzanne started collecting the money from everyone. Right about then I noticed some people cutting in line in front of us. First it was two people, then three, then a handful. I wanted to explain to them about the no-cutting policy that has been in effect, I believe, since the Pleistocene era, but that's when I noticed that they were all wearing name tags that said, "Walk with God."

This was a dilemma. If they were walking with God, were they cutting with God? And if so, would I be smitten if I declared the line a no-cutting zone? How could I, in good conscience, complain to somebody about cutting when they not only walked with God but proclaimed it in 64 point bold Helvetica on the front of a shirt? No, they were pretty holy, all of them, and far be it from me to start a rumble right there in front of Wonderland.

So I did what any other self-respecting, law abiding, name tag-less person would have done. I cut in front of them.

And then I convinced the other Mom's Club people to join me.

Well, that's really not fair. We had to get all together so we could get the group discount, and some people had strollers, and those strollers had babies in them, and those babies had . . . toxicity about them. We had to get all together, if not for the discount, for the health and well being of everyone in line, especially those that walked with God.

Under the vengeful hairy eyeballs of the other group (who I found out later were Jehovah's Witnesses) we dashed in, stamps on our hands, ready for the big rides.

I guess that evening the Witnesses walked with God and rode with God, but I think they threw up by themselves. That Pirate Ship ride is a real stinker. I almost lost dinner on that one myself.

Over the Rainbow

The storms come in pretty fiercely and forcefully in the Spring around here. Apparently when something or other comes off the Rocky Mountains and meets the dry line, which usually hovers right over us, big nasty things start erupting. Most of the time this spawns tornado watches, warnings, and willies, and the entire bottom eighth of the television is covered in a misshapen angry red map of all the counties under dire warnings around us.

When bad weather comes a-knockin', the sky turns a preternatural yellow and the clouds start taking odd and mysterious shapes such as the bottom of egg cartons or the profile of Richard Nixon.

At the end of a recent spat of nastiness, we all went outside to see what was what. There right over our house was a beautiful full rainbow. We oohed and aahed for a minute and then Megan said solemnly, "That's a sign of God's promise."

Colleen followed this with, "And there's treasure at the end too! Money, money, money!"

In just a few words those two girls of ours summed up the world pretty neatly and pretty accurately. I wonder how many other rainbows inspire such wisdom.

Cheeto Chips

Alex was playing very nicely, very quietly, and very alone with his bendy Spider-Man and dump truck when I overheard him singing a little made-up ditty. It went like this:

God is the man
with Cheeto chips.
I can eat my bottom.
[repeat]

Now that is American Idol material.

The Country Club

One of Suzanne's friends is trying to convince us to join a country club. She's doing this for selfish reasons: she and her daughter (one of Colleen's friends) don't like going to the pool alone and want a friend to go with them.

So she tries to put the squeeze on us, tempting us with crowdless swimming pools, fine dining, and plenty of golf, which is something I play only when it involves little bitty windmills, a stubby pencil, and colored balls. Her husband, a Serious Golfer, gave up trying to convince me of the sanctity of golf when I kept quoting Mark Twain - "Golf is a good walk spoiled."

Here are some surprising thing about this country club: one, as with most things around here, it is actually in the country. Two, many lawyers are members and many of them are Serious Golfers. This is a scary thing. Three, you have to eat dinner at the country club at least once a month or they'll charge you anyway. Four, they won't let you ride bicycles on the golf course, which is a terrible shame.

We ended up begging out of the invitation. Our friends were nice to think of us and even though the idea of throwing a Baby Ruth in the pool was attractive, it just wasn't enough for the $5.2 million a year we'd have to pay just to get three crummy months of swimming.

If only the place had a secret back room for chess-playing magicians. Then I'd reconsider.