It�s Sunday afternoon and I am watching the Royals-Orioles game, knitting away on Jeffy's winning sock. Anybody surprised? The weatherman from the local Fox affiliate (Mike) keeps coming on the tube, showing us rainbow colored maps and Doppler radar scans from places I�ve sorta heard of and know are �someplace up north.� The Kansas City Metro area is huge. Mike says there is a tornado warning but it�s for counties other than the one where I live, so I don�t much care. Play ball, damn it!

You have to understand, I live in Kansas. Tornados are nothing special. We spend all of April and May under tornado warnings. Kansans get testy when the weatherman interrupts their favorite teevee show. For years, I never saw the season finale of the X-Files because of severe weather warnings,and I am still bitter. Just last Wednesday night, the boys in group therapy were bitching mightily because Weatherman Mike preempted �American Idol� for a tornado, �someplace up North�. Fox must have gotten a lot of complaints too because next thing you know, Big Ol� Ruben is singing in the corner, while Mike has the big screen warning folks up North to please take cover. Over on the NBC affiliate, same thing. Viewers called in and threatened to tar and feather the weatherman for interrupting �The West Wing�. That storm turned out to be nothing.

BTW, I know a professional �weatherman� and he prefers to be called a �meteorologist.�

Also BTW, Trenyce, you was robbed, girlfriend.

Back to Sunday. Royals win 4-0. Hawk and Michael are gardening out back, like they have been all weekend. It�s cool and sunny, birds are chirping away. I mention the tornado warning. Hawk is a South Dakota boy, he doesn�t care, but Michael is from Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California USA. He has the good sense to respect and fear tornados. He suggests we head for the basement.

Both Hawk and I laugh. Mikey is such a sissy. We don�t head for the basement until the tornado is knocking on the front door. However, Meterologist/Weatherman Mike is even more animated, begging people to take cover. PLEASE. NOW! He has video from Skyfox, the traffic helicopter. There are wall clouds over the Kansas Speedway, 20 miles north at least. Yawn. Wall clouds; been there, done that.

Wait, what is that? A funnel descends from the wall cloud. Yikes, it�s a big one and it�s on the ground! It stays on the ground and grows to 400 yards wide. Thunder, lightening, baseball sized hail (!) Entire subdivisions are destroyed. Horses are lifted off the ground and end up in trees. A freight train is blown off the track. People are killed. Hawk gets the disaster call to report to the hospital.

Mother Nature wasn�t bluffing this time, this was one of the worst storms in KC history. Parts of the city look like downtown Baghdad. 20 miles isn�t that far away afterall

Meanwhile birds are still chirping in our own yard and it�s not even raining. We do get about 10 seconds of hail and by the time I find the camera to photograph the �baseball� sized hail, the pea-sized hail has turned to slush�and the sun comes back out.

So the moral of the story is:Pay attention to Tornado Warnings, because the system works. Next time, it could be our house

5 People have told Dr JJ all about it