Last night while I was watching television, I heard Chicago described as "The Windy City". I know that this has been the nickname for Chicago for many years, and I am sure they have lots of wind there. However, I believe that the title of "The Windy City" should instead be bestowed upon metropolitan San Gabriel/Hare, Texas.

I just think that those of us who live out here on the prairie know more about wind than the people in Chicago. Since August it has been windy every day, and I mean rampaging, tiresome, unmitigating wind. If I dare to leave the doors or windows open, I must be sure that I have tightly secured everything that might possibly be blown away. I must also face the fact that I will be cleaning all the countertops, dusting the entire house, and mopping the kitchen floor before bed, since the drought combined with the excessive wind means that we have a dust storm every single day. Except it's not really dust, it is actually tangible portions of the rich black-dirt fields which surround our property.

For the past 8 months it has been even windier than usual. Our child has had a sandbox for 5 months, but she has only been able to play in it 3 or 4 times because it's been too windy. I got a video camera for Christmas, and whenever I take outdoor videos it sounds like there is a freight train rumbling down the road directly in front of the house. Once last month when I was hanging laundry, the wind shifted quite suddenly from the south to the north, and I nearly got a concussion from the whipping sheet which I was trying to hang. When I feed the horses, in order to actually direct the grain into the feed trough, I have to pour the cans at least 5 feet to the north or south of the trough, to get the grain to blow into the trough. When I give the horses hay, I have to shield the hay from the wind by putting it directly in front of or behind the barn, otherwise it will just blow away. Once the wind actually blew a cement block off the top of some bales of hay I had stacked in the yard. Our DirecTV satellite, which is mounted on the south side of the house, gets blown so badly that we miss entire paragraphs of movie dialogue, or whole at-bats of baseball games.

The most striking example of the strength of the wind here occurred one night in February, when we literally had to nail shut the back door because it was blowing so strongly. Even as I write this, a strong wind has suddenly come up and a hard plastic lawn chair is blowing past my window.

Well, at least we don't have to worry about tsunamis.