August 18 through 20

Wednesday, August 18

Katrina Butler stopped in this morning to deliver the coupon books for her cheerleading fundraiser.  I bought one for myself and one for Lily.  Lily does a lot of shopping at HyVee.  I used to, but now I order most of my groceries through Lerbergs. 

Katrina is a very intelligent and sweet girl.  Her father (my cousin Jerry) is an idiot anti-vax, anti-mask, tRUMP loving idiot who brags about his commitment to OAN and Q-anon as “the only place you can get real news.”  Hahaha.  His daughter loves her father, but she also has her own and completely opposite thoughts on life and politics. 

We visited about 20 minutes about the world’s current conditions, Covid, idiocy of the “patriots” still awaiting tRUMP to regain his presidency, and many other things.  Peaches has not seen Katrina in literally YEARS.  I used to babysit her when I lived with my mother, and she always lavished love and attention on the cats.  When Peaches heard her voice, she came flying out of the bedroom, tail straight up in the air, prancing like a ballerina on the tips of her paws!  How she could remember Katrina, I will never know.  It have been at least 5-6 years since she has seen her.

When she got to Katrina, she fawned all over her—head butting her, rubbing her body all over her legs, rolling over to offer the fuzzy white belly for pets—the whole nine yards.  It was adorable.

When Katrina left, I bagged up a bunch of garbage and recycling, caught up with my DW entries, and folded some laundry.  I washed and dried a couple more loads of laundry and did some filing.  I have so much crap to go through and get organized that it exhausts me just to think about it.

It has become stifling hot and humid again.  I hate this type of weather.  Also, we need rain desperately.  The lawns are turning brown and the cornfields are starting to look very thirsty.  It was supposed to rain tomorrow, but they have changed the forecast and now say Friday is the day.  I hope we get something.

 

Thursday, August 19

Today, I took Mom to Owatonna so we could give the dog toys I ordered for them to the puppies.  We went to Subway first where we picked up two 12” subs and 7 bottles of Diet Coke and some cookies.  From there we went out to Joni’s and gave the toys to the pups.  They were not sure what to do with them at first.  They are surely the cutest, chubbiest, bounciest puppies I have ever seen.  The figured out the toys eventually and had good fun “killing” them. 

We didn’t stay there long as Joni is still weak and exhausted.  Jeff had picked sweet corn at his friend’s house last night, so he gave mom and me each two ears of fresh sweet corn.  I haven’t eaten any yet this year, but I do love it. 

Mom was hungry for a hot ham and cheese from Hardees, so we went there and got our actual lunch.  The subs were to take home to eat tomorrow.  I got a bacon cheeseburger.  It was delicious.  We ate our lunch at Morehouse Park by the dam. 

When we got back to Ellendale, I dropped Mom off at her house and then swung over to get my mail which is in a bag at my feet right now.  I just don’t feel like dealing with it at the moment.  I doubt there are too many bills in it since most of my bills come directly out of my checking account at this time.  I did get all my stuff into the house and put away.  I wasn’t hungry for supper since we had eaten lunch so late, so I made do with a couple of cookies.

I got a text message from Larry, my Schwan’s man, reminding me to put in an order before 11 pm.  I didn’t really want anything from Schwans, but Larry is a nice guy, so I ordered two pints of ice cream—one was a chocolate chunk with raspberries and the other was chocolate chunk with cherries—and another pack of single serve cheese pizzas.  They come six to a pack and make for a very easy, quick meal.

 

Friday, August 20

I slept in today—almost till noon.  I was tired and ached all over.  Last night, I had planned to call in a small grocery order this morning.  I did not need much, and this morning, I decided I didn’t need anything that badly, so I didn’t order anything.  Larry came fairly early in the day, and my purchases just fit into my freezer.  I ate half of my 12” sub for lunch and the other half for supper.  It was tasty, but apparently it was loaded with salt as I could not get enough water to quench my thirst afterwards. 

It started to cloud up in the early afternoon.  The weather people were predicting the possibility of severe storms moving from west to east, indicating that they should reach our area by 6 pm.  The sky kept getting darker and darker, and by about 4:30 pm, I could hear a distant rumbling.  At first I thought it was trucks on the highway or maybe a train as the tracks are only three blocks from my house.  The rumbling got louder as time passed, and soon I knew it was thunder that I was hearing.  By 8 pm, it was pitch black outside—well over an hour from when it normally gets full dark.  I checked the radar picture on my phone app and saw that a huge cluster of lightning and red blob of storm was just to the west of my location—maybe 20 minutes away. 

Then the rumbling started to change—it became sharp CRACKs.  It actually sounded more like gunfire than thunder.  Lily called me, all scared and frantic because she thought someone was throwing rocks at her windows.  I told her it was thunder and that I could hear it too.  She said she had never heard thunder like that before, and I told her it was the kind of thunder you get when the air is very full of electrical energy.

I told her that Waseca county was under a severe thunderstorm warning and that Steele county (where we live) had activated its tornado spotters.  Most of the severe weather was supposed to just skirt along the side of our county, but you never can tell what weather will do.

While I was still talking to her, the storm got here.  The lightning and thunder were impressive.  It rained pretty hard for about an hour, and we needed that rain desperately.  By the time I went to bed around 11:30 pm, it had dwindled down to sporadic sprinkles.  I wish it had rained all night long and all day tomorrow as well.

I watched a lame Hallmark movie that included time travel.  No actual person transported more than a hundred years into the future would have taken the shock as well as “Charles” did—even if he was an extremely brilliant and forward thinking inventor.

I did enjoy looking at the old mansion he had lived in which had been preserved as a historical site /museum after he had “disappeared” from his own time.