More gore, the road & thunder boomers

No, I'm not advocating Al Gore in this post. I'm really just warning you for more gruesome images of softball injuries.

This time, it's not me. In fact, I wasn't even there when it happened. No, I was at my apartment when Byron came in after a softball game. He had mentioned on the phone that, "he had got kinda banged up" in the night's game.

He made my little knee scrapes look like, well, little knee scrapes.

Apparently, it was necessary for him to slide into home plate. I will never complain about someone being competitive, because that would be the pot calling the kettle black. But, this guy wants to have a softball game the night of our rehearsal dinner. I'm pushing for him to wear a football helmet, but maybe a pair of sliding shorts would be more appropriate.

Let's just say this guy hurts really bad when he tries to sit down.


Way to show some leg.

I drove to Austin yesterday for the Texas Grain and Feed Association convention. The drive to the state capital from Lubbock is about 5.5 to 6 hours. The landscape changes rather drastically, to say the least, from point A to point B.

At one point, you're driving through fields that are home to thousands of wind turbines. I've talked about these things before, but seriously, you have to see them to get the full effect. There are tons of them.


These pictures do little justice to the size of these things.

From Lubbock to Austin, it's like going through a Texas version of Candy Land. You drive off the Caprock, through the land of wind turbines, over the hills, and end up in a big city full of pretty buildings, extremely fit people, and a couple of random celebrities like Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock. Oh, and tons of annoying Texas Longhorn fans. I vaguely remember the Hogs' Southwest Conference days, but I will always despise the burnt orange.

Meanwhile, I'm down here in Austin, while crazy storms have ravaged the South Plains. It hasn't really rained in Lubbock since late September of last year. Yeah, it's been that long.

But, tonight they've had two tornado warnings, pea-size to golf ball-sized hail, and flooding. The fun had to wait to happen until I was down here by a bridge that's home to hundreds of bats. (This will only make sense if I get up in time tomorrow to go down and photograph the bats that come out at sunrise beneath the Lake Austin bridge.)