Well, for those who think Denver is a quiet little cow town, a couple of 
nights ago, between about 8 and 10 PM, we had a couple of huge thunderstorms 
roll across western suburbs.  It rained really hard for quite awhile and the 
wind was pretty strong, too, but in some areas, the hail was ping pong ball 
size and literally got to be two feet deep in places of the western suburbs. 
Yep, you heard me right, two feet.  I was listening to the ham radio reports 
from that part of the Denver area because it just rained hard here where I 
live but about 20 minutes northwest of where I live, they had to call snow 
plows out to clear the highways of all the hail.  My youngest sister lives 5 
minutes west of my house and today she told me they had windows broken out, 
hail inside the house, the roof damaged, their gutters torn up, tree limbs 
broken off and laying all over the place, and her flower garden was 
pulverized.  A neighbor, she said, had 17 windows broken out from the hail. 
On the news this afternoon, I heard a man say he made 14 individual trips to 
a dumping area in Lakewood, which is across the street from me, Lakewood, 
that is, to completely clean up his house and yard from the storm.  That's a 
lot of mess.  More than a dozen years ago, probably closer to 18 or 20 years 
ago, there was a storm like that in northwest Denver that did 611 million 
dollars worth of hail damage.  Some reports claim this will be worse.  Sandy 
works part time answering calls and making appointments for a mobile vet and 
one lady she talked with can't find her little dog because before she could 
let him back in the house, the storm suddenly blew up and the dog is now 
missing.  Of course, that happens a lot in storms.  We got 32 inches of snow 
on the level one year about 5 years ago and I shoveled off our deck so the 
dogs had a path to get into the backyard.  I shoveled all the steps off and 
then shoveled a wide area of free space at the base of the steps because the 
snow was too deep for all of our dogs.  After letting them all back in one 
day, Sandy called me to come and find Zippy.  He was a dachshund and not 
very big.  He had worked his way into the deeper snow piles up and gotten 
stuck under the steps so I had to go and fish him out.  Fortunately, this 
winter storm of 32 inches was in mid April and the next day it was 50 
degrees and the snow melted by the end of the week.

Phil.