Do you remember, the 21st night of September

Actually, we weren't really doing anything the 21^st night of September, but here's what we did the rest of the month.


Melody doesn't want me to spend four hours writing this, so let me sum up...

We decided to journey out into the far reaches of Kansas City to get an idea of what the lay of the land was like. We did manage to find a few interesting places. First, we visited Liberty Jail on Labor Day. In between school sections we found a free weekend to visit the Winter Quarters temple again and we ran into a few relatives (some alive, some dead). Last weekend we visited a local trail just outside of the city called Cave Springs. We didn't find the springs but we did find a giant black rat snake. We spend the rest of the hike jumping at every leaf that fell. That's why we don't have any pictures of that outing. This weekend we visited a another local park, called Kauffman Park. Once again we were fortunate enough to stumble upon some local wildlife. See the pictures for more details. And yesterday we visited the Smithsonian WWI museum (thanks Paul for the heads-up on free admissions for Museum Day).

Well, that just about sums it up. Outside of the extremely eventful outings, I managed to avoid failing my first class in medical school and Melody is just bursting with joy at all of the free time that she has to herself (note heavy sarcasm) since the job hunt has been less than successful so far. We are hopeful that things will get better these next few weeks.

Survival of the Ignorant

This is a picture one of the locals took of a tornado that touched down on Friday.

We successfully survived our first tornado this week. The only thing we know about tornadoes we learned from the movie Twister, and that didn't help us at all.

So the story goes like this: Friday night we are in the kitchen preparing dinner and decided to turn on the news, as we sometimes do. The meteorologist comes on to tell us that a

The official warning.

tornado watch had been issued for the entire Kansas City metropolitan area, and a tornado warning had been issued in a few counties, including Jackson county where we live. For those of you who may not be familiar with the difference, a watch means that conditions are favorable for a tornado and a warning means that a tornado is imminent.

The view of the storm out our window.

We weren't sure if we needed to panic or not, so we decided to be calm for a bit. Our composure lasted for a little while until the community tornado sirens sounded. The funny thing about all this is that we looked out the window and we couldn't even tell that anything was going on because it wasn't raining and the wind wasn't blowing. 15 minutes later we finally saw something exciting when an ominous wall of low-flying clouds covered the city.

After a few inches of rain and absolutely zero tornado sightings, we realized that there was really nothing to worry about. Later we learned that a few tornadoes did form and touched down south and east of us. One was only a few miles away, but they didn't do much damage and, as far as we know, no one was hurt.