Whole Hog

It's Saturday afternoon, another warm, muggy, threatening day in the flooded cornfields of Iowa. We are under a tornado watch again, although it is just cloudy and gusty outside now. I just finished mowing the lawn, and now I am trying to cool off, listening to the pre-race coverage of the Belmont Stakes. This morning, I judged barbeque at the Great Pork Barbe-Q-Lossal, which is part of the World Pork Expo in Des Moines. The huge Iowa State Fairgrounds were packed with everything to do with hogs. The BBQ contest was on one side, and included about 62 of the top teams. It is a Kansas City Barbeque Society sanctioned contest, but it is one of the very few that is allowed to vary from the official categories of chicken, ribs, pork, and brisket. Instead, it is an all-pork contest, with categories for whole hog, ribs, pork shoulder, and pork loin. Needless to say, I ate a lot of pork this morning, and came home with plenty for later. Some of the barbeque was absolutely phenomenal, with some really interesting flavors. Unfortunately, since the judging is blind, you never know whose barbeque you ate. That means you can't ask the teams what techniques they used or what spice that was (not that they would probably tell). It was a great time, and delicious. I know I seem to always talk about the nasty weather on this blog, and today I will again. This week was terrible. There were three nights of severe weather, with the weather radio going off throughout the night, and tornados going by. Wednesday night was spent partly in the basement, as tornados hit the counties just north, west and south of us. On Thursday night, the weather service suddenly detected one right here in Waukee. We grabbed Asher and actually ran to the basement, and stayed there listening to the wind howl and the tornado sirens going off. The funnel ended up not touching down, but it was right over our neighborhood, according to the radar. One thing about the weather stations here, when there is a tornado, they zoom in on the Doppler radar and show what roads it is crossing. It rained about 5 inches here that night. After several straight days of this weather, Iowa is flooding. The rivers have risen several feet since last week, and some neighborhoods are already underwater. More bad weather tonight will only make things much worse. Our house is high and dry (well, except for the swampy area in our back lawn and the constantly running sump pump).