Its called a Haboob

First, this is Mike speaking.

So, if you're not aware, Lubbock is sort of out in the middle of nowhere. Like hours away from any sort of life, including plants, animals (excluding armadillos), etc. This has some pluses and minuses, I guess. Some pluses, for example, are that 6 hour car trips really don't seem like that big of a deal anymore. 2 hours away seems so close. One of the many problems is that there is not really any trees or vegetation for hours, which makes it so nothing holds all the dirt together when the wind comes. This causes huge dust storms to hit Lubbock, and when it happens the dust gets into EVERYTHING and the sky turns orange. We woke up to one this morning. From just walking to our car after church I was tasting sand for a long time.

So we had a really big dust storm back in October, and I was talking to some fellow students who were from Lubbock the day afterward. When I spoke about how crazy the dust storm was the day before, they kind of gave me a look, scoffed and criticized my word choice. "Its called a Haboob," they corrected, "not a dust storm." I seriously thought they were making it up, so I looked it up in Wikipedia, and sure enough, it is called a Haboob. They are a certain kind of dust storm that only happen in the deserts of Africa...and west Texas. I feel I can safely post these pictures now because I know that my friends who are heading to medical school this year won't be considering Texas Tech, so it won't do anything to dissuade them from coming.