Twist and Twisters

We were in our church meeting last Sunday and the first meeting was nearly over. The Bishop suddenly announced that the meeting would end early so everyone could go to the basement because a tornado had just been spotted...out the back door. The person who was asked to give the bendiction to the meeting must not have been paying any attention because he proceeded to pray for a while and not for saftey. After he finally said, "Amen," everyone went down to the basement. At least most people. I did what you are supposed to do in situations like that. I went to my truck, turned on the ham radio to listen to the storm spotters and drove home to get my digital camera and video camera.

Now the tornado was one of a couple spotted over the city, but they were only low velocity funnel clouds, not a tremendous amount bigger than a large dust devil. They could have caused some damage, but didn't. That was the beginning of the week. There were numerous tornados that day and throughout the week. A friend of mine who is a storm spotter got an excellent video of a tornado north of here. He made the national news with his video, in fact. On the other hand, all the storms were somewhere I wasn't. I didn't even take the cameras out of the case....this week.

I'll keep my eye on the clouds and the radio on the spotter frequency and maybe I'll post a picture here in the next month or so.

Twist

You Learn Something New....

Turns out you can learn something new every day. Sometimes I have trouble chewing gum and walking at the same time, but I didn't think it affected other areas. I went to a blood drive to donate and I knew you're not supposed to drink anything shortly before taking your temperature as it will make it lower, hiding possible infections. This is one of the reasons doctors make you wait so long in the waiting room before they see you. They want an accurate temperature reading. Knowing this, I decided to chew some gum so I wouldn't be thirsty while waiting for my turn. With the mint gum I like it gives the added bonus of halfway decent breath for the technicians who take your blood. What I didn't realize is that chewing gum, especially mint or cinnamon gum will raise your temperature in your mouth. My temperature tested at 100.4. The technician had me spit out my gum, but didn't wait long enough and my temperature only dropped 1 degree, which was still too high to donate. The CDC has mandated that they can only test you twice then you can't donate. So I learned this one thing now. Don't chew gum before you go to the doctor, however if you want a good excuse for not going to school........

Twist