Hi,

 

I work with your teacher's husband, I'm from a town in West Texas panhandle

about 70 miles west of Lubbock called Muleshoe.

Winters there could get down to Zero degrees Fahrenheit and it wasn't

unusual to have a week or two below 20 degrees with two or three feet of

snow..  The landscape is very flat there and the altitude is about 3000 feet

higher than around Dallas.  The wind blows nearly all the time, which makes

the chill factor stay very low, too.  Winter is over in mid February, then

the sandstorms come.  The farmers don't have anything planted during the

winter, so the constant winds blow sandy soil at from 20-50 mph all over the

place and gets into everything-- cars, houses, eyes, mouths, billfolds,

(ruins credit card magnetic stripes,  hair (makes it all full of static

electricity) and everyone stays generally miserable for the next 6 weeks.

Finally spring comes- some years it rains a lot and we'll have flooding, but

the land is too flat for the water to go anywhere, so it collects in Playa

lakes, which are low spots in the prairie.  Within a few days, frogs appear

out of nowhere (hatch out of the ground where they've been hibernating) and

you can hear millions of them croaking at night in a great roar, the lakes

are soon completely full of tadpoles. Summers are usually fairly dry and

hot, with highs in the mid to upper 90's but around sundown the temperature

cools down to the 70's, and sometimes when there is a "Norther", it can cool

down to the 50's,  Fall starts about the end of September and it frosts by

mid October,  people take blankets to the football games, it gets pretty

cold. You don't see many fall colors because there aren't many trees.  All

in all, West Texas is a good place to be "from".

I hope this helps you out on your project.  Let us know if you have any

questions.

 

____________________________________

Steven Bickel