Despite the forces of the world messin' with us this month, we have escaped unscathed. Andrew was supposed to fly on this cool renovated B-17 for a Father's Day gift this year. We went to the airport where they were running these flights and watched it and the P-40 they had take off/land a few times. Andrew didn't get to take his flight though because the B-17 landed...and then started gushing fuel. Needless to say, they cancelled the rest of the flights. Two days later, the plane was a smoldering pile of scrap in the middle of a corn field. It had caught fire on the way to Indianapolis. We're actually quite sad- there aren't that many of those things around anymore.
Here's a shot of the B-17 in flight, over the back of the P-40.
And here's the Liberty Bell pouring jet fuel on this nice man. The fire department was called.
Last night, we had a little solstice excitement. There was a huge thunderstorm that began right as we put Riley to bed. Andrew checked the weather online and saw that there was a tornado warning in effect. We watched out the windows for a few minutes, and the trees swirling about like corkscrews convinced us that a trip to the basement was necessary. We have these 80 ft. ash trees in the back yard, which would make short work of our house if they fell on it! So poor Riley was pulled out of bed right after he'd fallen asleep. Luckily he found Andrew to be just as nice a mattress and went right back to sleep. We heard trees falling while we were in the basement. When it was over, we saw that a branch of the ash had narrowly missed Dane's car in the driveway. Trees were down all over the neighborhood. The ash across the street hit 4 cars. We of course lost out power during all of this, and found out this morning at work that there was actually a tornado here. Good thing Andrew checked because we never heard the sirens. We ended up with superficial damage, but our block has been trashed! One house had 4 big trees topped off in it's front yard.
Here's two topped trees. The evergreens seemed to take it especially hard. We got lucky that the two in the neighbor's yard didn't come down on us too.
Every yard in the block had branches if not full trees down. The curb was a levee of broken limbs.
This house is under construction now, and lost a big maple in the front yard that narrowly missed the porch.Lastly, here are a few pictures of my favorite subject, doing what he does best...
Riley's new art table in the basement is a HUGE hit. He loves to go down there and create without us pestering him.
Our first harvest from the garden was these cool white radishes. Riley loves to pick stuff out of the garden, even when it's not quite ready yet. Also check out our awesome new fence [aka rabbit shield].
This year's trip to the tadpole pond. Always a favorite!
