Water

Joseph Ellmore is living the good life at the Winfield city lake.  “Enjoying the beautiful weather and trying to catch some fish,” said Ellmore.    For the past three years he's done so no problem, but this year city officials noticed something different. “Our water folks noticed that there was a change of color in a portion of the lake,” said Winfield City Manager Warren Porter. They worry blue green algae is to blame. “There are very many different strains of that.  We don't know which on it is if that's what it is,” said Porter.  That's why the city called the Kansas Department of Health and Enviorment.  KDHE plans to come out Monday and test the water to see if it's actually blue green algae.  Earlier Tuesday, KDHE said it already did the test but later said that wasn't the case.

A Lyons man dies in an accidental drowning Saturday afternoon. It happened at Kanopolis Lake in Ellsworth County around 12:30pm. Authorities say 40-year-old John Freeman III of Lyons was camping at the lake when he went into the water to swim. People from another campsite saw his body floating in the water. They went and got him out and tried to administer CPR but it was too late.

Want to make a messy pan?  Then reach for the bacon, the eggs, or even worse:  the cheese! But there is a purpose to an afternoon of  bad cooking at the Sedgwick County Extension Office.  Today's Does It Work:  the $10 Grease Bullet, which says it will get your pans sparkling clean without scrubbing. However, when the words get small Denise Dias and her gang get suspicious.  "It says photos on this package have been dramatized. "  The front cover shows a pan filthy with burned food on its top half, but shiny clean on the bottom half---as if the bottom were soaked in the Grease Bullet.

Instead of giving relaxing massages on her busiest weekend of the year, the owner of Massage Junkie, Heather Mckendry is frantically emptying out her business, sorting through piles of rubble. "It is pretty upsetting," she said. One of her employees opened on Wednesday to find water, inches deep on the ground. "There was water everywhere and entire chunks of ceiling gone," Mckendry said. The copper pipes had frozen and burst in six different places and what wasn't sitting in water got rained on. Her usually calm, Zen-like business now has loud fans lining the halls; a water restoration crew is in the process of cleaning up. "We are removing baseboards and drying the carpet to prevent any secondary damage," said the general manager of The Butler Group Chris Goodman.

by Denise Hnytka (WICHITA, Kan) The nation's largest pediatricians group is relaxing its stance against swimming lessons for children younger than 4. A few small studies now suggest toddlers may be less likely to drown if they've had swim lessons. That's why the American Academy of Pediatrics says it's fine to enroll children as young as one in classes. The YMCA offers parent/child classes for kids as young as two. It says the classes are popular, especially in the spring sessions.

By Kim Hynes (HUTCHINSON, Kan.) Rivers and creeks are rising in Reno County. The waterways are swollen because of all of the rain we've had over the last few days. That's prompted many to pull out their canoes and tubes and float in the water. But authorities say it's too dangerous and you should stay off. Reporter Video: Kim Hynes at the Flooded Cow Creek Campers at the Kansas Bible Camp are following the warnings. The director says anytime the water rises, he keeps kids out of the Cow Creek.

When the weather's nice, there's nothing better than hitting the water to do a little wakeboarding.  But it's certainly not as easy as it looks.  I found that out as took the board and hit the water.

A day in the sun means taking a dip in the water for many at Riverfest. About a dozen kids turned a fountain into their own pool to escape Sunday's triple digit heat. Riverfest used to be held in early May and the rainy weather caused attendence less than what organizers were hoping for. So the event was moved to June. Even though official numbers aren't available yet, organizers say more people are coming. To escape the heat though, people are urged to get in the shade if they start to feel overheated.

Your lawn does not need to be as green as money to be healthy. Some types of grass naturally browns to stay alive. "The lawn just goes dormant basically, typically it shouldn't die," said Marty Johnson of Johnson's Garden Center. "It will come back again later in the fall if it turns brown. If the crown of the grass is pretyt much gone, the lawn would be dead. " For the next several days, the temperatures will exceed 100 degrees. You might be tempted to water your lawn more often, but Johnson says that's a bad idea.

Ever have those evenings when you're so busy you don't think you have time to wait for a pot of water to boil for pasta?  How about cooking that pasta in the microwave? The Pasta n' More says it's easier than cooking on the stove top. So we headed to Italian Gardens Restaurant for a throw down.  Cinthia has cooked for the restaurant for 7 years and says there's no way a microwave can cook pasta, period-- let alone taste good enough you'd want to eat it. She agrees, though, to give it a try. The directions are straightforward:  put water in the Pasta n' More up to the fill line, add the pasta and put it in the microwave.