I have watched clouds fill the sky and seen periods of sun – and, always, there has been the wind. It is gusting strong. I doubt that is the best way to express it grammatically, but it captures the feeling. When I was in Scott’s parking lot with a half-price vegetable tray in my sack, the wind turned the sack inside out and the veggies went plop, but the tray stayed closed.

In the time since I started typing until right now, the sky has gone from a threatening Melville storm to an exultant blue. And now it’s back again.

I hear a siren . . . maybe a tree came down, or power lines were ripped off poles. Guess this is one time I can find a use for my extra weight.

I am sore today because I decided to totally ignore Friday the 13th and worked with machinery. So, okay, the steam cleaner had picked up FISHING LINE at the very last suck of basement cleaning a couple of days ago AND NOBODY KNEW IT. Of course I knew it after I had toted it up to the porch and unknowingly pulled more and more fishing line off the reel . . . and when I turned it on, it sucked it all in and stopped.

It took me one and half hour to get it fixed, but fortunately perseverance prevailed and water got sucked back up and the rug got cleaner.

Then, high on my success, I mowed the yard. Nothing bad happened.

But last night I was tired and stiff and this morning I am stiffer. Maybe I should take a couple shots of single malt scotch and feel lubricated – although I’d still be a stiff.

Decisions.

So, last night came the news of the raccoon in the trash can – the trash can that had to go out to the street for morning pick-up. These are the thoughts that ran through my head:

Glad it was Cameron that saw it and not me; I have already had the famous Palatine, Illinois Raccoon Encounter, in which I was watching a late show in a room with six-foot sliding doors on the east side and eight-foot sliding doors on the north side, with a deck going around the corner from one to the other. A forest preserve was close by and I heard a sound and looked over my shoulder and saw these BIG EYES looking right at me. I might have yelled.

With this experience under my belt, my first thought was 10-foot pole . . . with Cameron on one end and the trash can on the other. In my mind, I saw the raccoon pull off an Errol Flynn jump and land on Cameron and nip him . . . with a possibly rabid mouth.

Cameron may or may not have been thinking something similar, although I am fairly certain Errol Flynn was not in his scenario. He said he thought he’d wait to take out the trash. And I said, “Okay.”

But we both dozed off and when I woke up it was time to take Alison to work and she said she got Robert to take the trash out because Cameron hadn’t done it. And I launched into the Raccoon Story, although I think I embellished a little. It was a HUGE raccoon and we would have needed a 100-foot pole with spikes on it, dipped in deadly poison. And we didn’t have an antidote in case there was a little accident.

If the trip to the hospital had been any longer and I had talked more, I suppose the news trucks from the supermarket tabloids would be pulling up out front about now.

Cameron just came in and said a raccoon was in one of our trash cans. So there is a plot and it will thicken, I think.

Yes, I don’t have to post this, and as Der Bingle and Quentin pointed out in a 3-way telephone chat, “log” is not really the correct word. Really, I didn’t have to tell them; I was alone when it happened. But it seemed like such a good story . . .

I had mowed for hours and decided to put in 10 more minutes and clean up some scruffy spots when I got too close to a ditch-like area in which tall grass was hiding a pine branch, oh, about the size of a man’s arm. IT HAPPENED SO FAST!

I was stuck but managed to get moving and drove the mower into the garage with about 8 inches of log sticking out. Good thing the garage area was wide enough. Do you know I once carried a dog with his leg in a cast through a doorway the wrong way and there was a THUD?
And today I backed into the new berm/mound and bent one of the reflectors Der Bingle had put up just for me. Go ahead and think it: pathetic.

Anyway, it was the newish mower – the shiny mower. I guess I am going to have to call the folks at Crystal Valley and have them come and pick it up – along with the older, not so shiny one that won’t start. That would be the one I got too close to a fallen tree on and managed to get the blade to punch right through the cover. I wrote about that last summer, but I’m not linking to it. I’m too hang-dog to link.

As penance I am going to make myself clean up the old Lawn-Boy, study up on the oil/gas mixture and actually start p-u-s-h-i-n-g. It’s not like the little baby mower I use on the lawn in Kendallville; it’s more like a tank – that you push. Mother was pretty confident that self-propelled mowers never built character.

But you have riders, you exclaim. Well, yes, Mother started mowing fields and I left for college. I was invited to Indiana University for a special program the summer before my freshman year and when I came home, I saw my parents had been mowing with a riding mower. This is probably basically what happened to a guy on one of Der Bingle’s flight crews. His dad had a garden every year until he graduated . . . and then it was off to the produce department.

Water. They were giving away water. Who would have thought it? As my husband and I pulled up to the Four Way Stop intersection of Dowling and Park, we saw young folks walking up to cars and I reached for my purse because I thought they were asking for donations for something. I assumed it was a good cause because otherwise the police in this small town would have intervened at the intersection. (I didn’t need to add “at the intersection” because it is intuitive, but alliteration grabbed me and I didn’t fight back.)

Ah, getting back to the people, cars and stop signs. A young man approached my side with a bottle of water and I assumed they were selling it. NO. THEY WERE GIVING IT AWAY. They said they weren’t allowed to accept money. I took one because I have become a great fan of water and it tastes especially good on a warm afternoon.

Not only that – it was cheering to see people smiling and sharing and just doing something nice for the hell of it. Oh, sorry, we’re talking about a church here so let me rephrase that the way my father would want me to say it: for the heck of it.

Thanks, First Christian Church of Kendallville, Indiana. Thank you very much. Thank you for making me want to be better, nicer, kinder than I am.

Hi, there, this is me, Rose, posting for AmeliaJake because she is lying here with a cold cloth on her forehead. See heard from Pottermom about the benefits of that little yellow flower she is always complaining about. THESE FACTS. Right before she collapsed on the couch, she said, “Maybe I was w-w-w-w-w (at this point I hit her on the head and she managed to get it all out) wrong.”
Soon I will be making her a dandelion tonic. Hahahahahahahahaha. And, you know, as chief counselor here, I think I, Rose, should, make her face the facts every time she scrolls down the blog entries.
For you, my dear, sweet, AmeliaJake:

No one got her nose punched in the decision to stop for a quick shop and then stopped again for a lunch at Logan’s.

Although at Logan’s, I was giving someone a controlled experiment on launching peanuts with a fork, just aiming one low across the table. Well, it went straight up and came straight down. We got curious and tried different techniques and it was always up and down. So, I suspect Logan’s has anticipated hooligan behavior and shaped its forks to not be peanut launchers. I guess they have had people who are “controlled experimenters” visit their restaurants.

I suppose I am going to have bring my own fork. JUST KIDDING.

I have something else to worry about. The dandelions are back in my grass – not widespread, but they are there. LZP and the Gnome Alliance have widely proclaimed the benefits of dandelions, and yeah, I have to admit there is some validity to their claims. The same can be said of leeches . . . shudder . . . so maybe we could just cultivate the big Yellow D’s in confined areas, designated for medicinal purposes.