Labor Day Weekend, Part 2

Today, Katie's family came to the Mohning residence for some lunch, tubing, and outdoor enjoyment. After a much shorter mass than the first one I attended, we got back to the house and had a really good lunch and some beverages. The younger kids then hit the lake for some swimming and tubing, all of which later involved Katie's grandpa jumping into the lake. Later that evening, we ordered pizza and watched some Sound of Music. Brandon, I'm wondering about you now. Then I spent hour upon hour cutting out little pieces of paper for Katie's brother's wedding invites and then watched quite an interesting movie with Katie's dad that starred Charlie Sheen and two of the main guys from Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Labor Day Weekend, Part 1

Today I managed to go to Art Splash with Katie and the fam down on the river in Sioux City, Iowa. It had lots of paintings, sculptures, pottery, etc for sale, a handful of things for kids to do, a few performers, and a lot of fair-like food. Not a bad time. After it started warming up, we made our move to head for home, stopping a few times, including Best Buy, where I picked up a brand new Nikon D80 with an 18-135mm zoom lens. So let's just say I took a picture or two the rest of the weekend. I'm sure they will follow. Once we got home, we headed out onto the lake and did some tubing (for about 10 minutes). Katie and I are unexplainably sore, and apparently very old. We got back to land, cooked out some steaks, and had a nice dinner on the waterfront deck at sunset. Pretty good day.

Cops: Hutchinson

So evidently Hutchinson is becoming something of a police state. We were told it was a pretty quite little town when we moved here, but we've had some serious problems lately. Here's a recap of the last week or so:

On Thursday, luckily we were on our way to Indiana, because there was a standoff about 4 blocks away from our apartment. Apparently police had reason to believe a parole violator was in on of the apartments nearby and spent five hours trying to get him out. They had blocked of a 6 block radius in all directions, which would have included our apartment, so we wouldn't have been able to get home. The ordeal ended with broken windows and teargas... and no sign of the guy they were looking for. I posted his picture, in case you see him somewhere around the world.

Then, yesterday, we had a bomb threat and hostage situation at the grocery store we shop at. It was apparently part of a larger scheme that is happening all across the country. You'll have to read the story if you want a lot of details, because I'm not repeating them all, but it involves phone calls, nudity, bombs, money, and cutting off fingers. Not a bad movie plot.

So, what could possibly happen today to continue the story? Another call came into another Dillon's grocery store that's about two blocks away from my office! Same story, but they got people out of there pretty fast this time. They closed the street down for a while and then it was all over. But, some goobers in town thought it would be funny to call Wal-Mart and a couple other grocery stores in town and make bomb threats. They did it with their cell phone, and police caught them later this evening. There were about six of them and they all had outstanding warrants.

Lightning Photo

Lightning, originally uploaded by scott_allen13.

Here's a photo from a storm we had about a week ago. I was pretty pumped that I caught some lightning, but it took me quite a few tries.

Ball State Football

The Cardinals will have high hopes this season with Nate Davis behind center, but I thought this would be the first season since 1997 that I didn't make it to a game. However, I received a tip that BSU would make a trip to fabled Nebraska in September. So I put in some calls to my powerful connections and managed to secure tickets to the game, despite Nebraska's record of 282 straight sellouts. Katie and I will head to Lincoln on Sept 22 to cheer on the Cards to... a respectable showing, hopefully.