Saturday, April 3, 2010

A virtual tour of my hometown. I hope.

If you take a map of the United States (minus Alaska and Hawaii for this effort) and plunk you finger down smack in the middle you should land somewhere quite near a largish city straddling the state line between Kansas and Missouri, called (oddly enough) Kansas City. Just a few miles to the east is my hometown of Independence, Missouri where "the trails start and the buck stops."

The land here is made up of gently rolling hills covered with trees and undergrowth, so thick you can't walk through is unless there is a path. Oh, watch out for the poison ivy! We get about 40 inches of precipitation yearly, snow in winter and hard thunderstorms in the spring and summer. High temperatures in the summer can top out over 100 degrees F and in Winter below 0 degrees F. Right now we are heading into what the weather folks call the severe weather season, meaning the potential for tornados, large hail (grapefruit sized sometimes) and damaging winds. When the summer comes the humidity may get so near 100% without rain that you can feel you are breathing water! Along with that come gorgeous days of sunshine and blue skies that just make you want to stay outside from dawn to dark. It changes all the time and causes the weather people lots of trouble with their predictions.

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