tom and the pigeon

So I was drivin around looking for rainy day pictures today and for some reason I had this dumb idea that a picture of a bird splashin about in a bird bath would be appropriate and a surprising amount of yards in Hutchinson have birdbaths in them, sometimes 3 or 4, but there weren't any birds playing in them and I had to go take a picture of this guy dropping off this humungous dumpster as part of a city cleanup thing and then i was about out of time before the swim meet and I saw this gimongous pigon walking around in this carwash and I thought OMG that pigeon's as big as a chicken! and I pulled around behind the car wash and the pigeon had hopped on top of the carwash and then i thought well thats not the picture I wanted, so I waited. And I waited some more and i drove around again and he got off the roof and decided to hide inside the carwash on this bar with these lights on it and I got mad at him cuz I wanted his fat ass walking around on the ground with traffic blurred behind him, and the stupid pigeon never came down.

So I took a picture of this dumb robin that flew in and stood there a second, with a truck driving by perfectly centered behind him and it was stupid, even more stupid than the good picture of the fat chicken-sized pigeon would have been, even though at the time I thought it would look cool with blurred traffic and puddles and fat pigeon. He was really huge, like in the picture above if I could hold a quarter up next to him, you wouldn't even be able to see it, thats how huge he was.
This photo ran today I think. There was this anhydrous ammonia leak in this little almost-a-town called Iuka and the guys there said I couldnt take pictures so I had to back up way to the street and take a picture like this and the guy is holding up some kinda restricted area tape around the tanks, so I figured that's where the leak was, or around there.

Also I went the Hutchinson High School swim meet today at the YMCA. HHS is cool enough to have an orchestra, I guess they're cool enough to have swim teams too. My high school never had that stuff.
Also, this is what Kansas looks like mostly when you drive through it. I got to go to Greensburg, the town that was 90% destroyed by an EF5 tornado last year. It's about 80 some miles away from Hutchinson. I cant show the pictures I took there yet. The story is about a family that's now moved into their new home after their old one was destroyed.

In other news, Ive been reading about Afghanistan and the Taliban in the book called Taliban, by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. It's good. and interesting. Even though it only covers up to 2000, before 9/11 so it doesnt mention anything about the US/Canada/others driving the Taliban out of Mazar, Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and into the hills where they now reside.

After I finish that one, I think i'm going to pick up my history of islamic societies text book and start it, but its like 900 pages so it might take me lots longer. Also I befriended a Muslim guy named Mouhmad I think who's a Tech guy at HCC.

TB