This red mulch is rubber and is made from recycled tires. I don’t think it looks too bad, and actually since it is a purpose for old tires that are usually in landfills, I think it is very lovely.

It started out okay with the old barn I love in the background of Wal-Mart’s spring outdoor stuff; $5 films: 20 Alfred Hitchcock, included a couple of silent films and A River Runs Through It – great book, great movie. Then we hit the check-out line. Yes, line and oh, my gosh, only two lights were on for people who had more than 11 items and couldn’t use a Fast Lane because they don’t want full cart people to do that. We waited such a long time.

When I got up to the cashier, for whom I have great sympathy, I noted that they have two automated questions on the touch screen for payment: Was the store clean? or Did your cashier greet you? There is no question that asks “Were enough lines open?” We got to talking and she confirmed they 1) have to call Arkansas if they are sick and can’t make it in and 2) have to pass a customer to another associate if it’s time for their shift to end. That’s really fun when you are asking questions about a product and then have to ask them all over again of another person.

But it’s sunny today, so that is good.

I am not pleased with my granddaughter’s attitude about Grover. She says he is stupid. What a jerk . . . she is. She found a copy of The Monster at the End of This Book on th bookshelf and was joking around with it in front of her dad. I told her that wasn’t the original book – that we had gone through perhaps four copies when her dad was somewhere around one year old. I would sit on the little cherry rocker that had belonged to me grandfather, the one that I had been rocked in, and read TMTETB over and over again. The cover, back and front – fell off of the first one; one copy split in half. They were all stained and wrinkled and dogeared. I didn’t need the book to remember the words, but I appreciated it for Grover’s picture. My memory could never do justice to his little face and gestures and the true-blueness of his fur.

Now, this twerp girl mocks him. Never you mind her, Grover. You are so very dear to so many of us here. I love you.

This fellow, while remembering things about his days in the 52’s, remarked that now he understood what the old WWII fliers where experiencing when they visited the AF Museum in Dayton, Ohio.

This museum here – the one where you can stand on the grass and stick your head into the guts of the plane – is at Warner-Robins in Georgia.

I remember when this fellow in Georgia took off from SAC bases in this model plane. The wings were so long there was a wheel on the end of each wing – because they soft of flapped when the planes rolled down the runway for take-off. We would watch one after another lift into the air when we would visit the alert visitor’s area and the klaxon went off. There was a guy who was 35 on the crew and we all worried that he would collapse after running to the airplane; the guys would tease him about breathing hard. They said he was OLD . . . hahahahahahahahahaahahahahaha!

I look at that title and even thought I was thinking of the wind that is weather – breezes, gusts, straight line and so forth, I get the image of a wind-up toy in my mind. But never mind that. Too late? Well, I should have kept my mouth shut.

It is windy here. No, do not see all the folks walking around stiffly with a little thing to twist coming out of their backs; words such as “wind” can be a problem, can’t they? Another one is polish. How much polish do  you need to screw in a light bulb? For seem reason my spirits are up right now, even though they are manifesting themselves in a juvenile fashion. I mean spirits as in attitude – not liquor, although it is up too. You knew that though, didn’t you?

Okay, really, the shrubs and trees are whipping around and I have to go out and drag a limb that came down off the sidewalk. I am hoping it is a dead one that has been threatening to come down and will be light and, obviously, no longer a threat. I was not aware of this until middle age, but the chief cause of death in the days of early settlement in these parts was falling limbs. Sometimes it amuses me to think of how residential lots are now advertised as “wooded” when back then, the draw might have been a “clearing” in which to build.

I have strayed from the weather topic – I guess the wind blew me off.

Even though the new WordPress upgrade tells you that your image did not pass the upload test, it is sucked into the Media Library, from which you can pull it out by it’s url. Sounds kind of graphic, doesn’t it. I did not know this for two days. I kept trying to upload from my computer and was rebuffed every time. But, you can work around this if you enter it with the url it has been assigned when it somehow sneaks into the Media Library. Or maybe it is Shanghaied and wakes up to find itself there.