Kaymusings

As I checked out of Walmart the other day, the clerk asked me the traditional question, “Did you find everything you were looking for?”

As a matter of fact, I didn’t.  I had been looking for cookies, –because it’s too hot to bake lately.  I cruised through all the aisles where they stocked the groceries and the cookies were nowhere to be found.  So I asked.

I think you’d never guess where they put the cookies!  In the very back of the store by the paper products!

“Who came up with that idea?”  I blurted.  “I would never have thought to look there.”

The theory, of course, is that I would search over the whole store, making lots of impulse purchases while I searched.  In reality, I looked all through the traditional grocery aisles and gave up and decided to buy those cookies when I go to the store near me where I know where they are.
However, I’m just shaking my head that they would move cookies to the very back of the store with paper products.  If I don’t need to buy paper products, I don’t even go to that part of the store.

I wonder if there is anyone else like me that just gives up, or do most people ask a clerk, or do they really wander through the store snapping up items that they don’t really need and never intended to buy?

I was on a geocache with my son but I forgot to wear my old walking shoes.  We’ve had a lot of rain in our area and it had rained again just before we went out to find this particular cache.  I didn’t want to walk half a mile through very wet areas with my “good” shoes, so I lingered near the car while he went to find it.  While I waited I noticed the teasels that were growing along the road.  I hadn’t noticed teasels in the last few years, but I think that this year they are bigger than usual.

It brought back memories.  When I was teaching third grade, I collected enough teasels to share with my class and we used them to make interesting art projects.  That seems so long ago now.  —Well, it was a long time ago.  I have been retired for more than 15 years.  But the teasels memory is a pleasant one for me.

I didn’t not pick any of these teasels.  I just took the picture of them.

My grandson spent a week at Miracle Mountain Ranch.  When we went for the closing program of the week, he pulled himself up to this low hanging branch and posed for a photo.  He had fund during the week at the ranch, and he had fun lounging on the tree branch.

This is a picture of Rusty on August 5, the day we brought him home from the pet hospital.  He had an enlarged lymph node in his neck and it was growing larger.  It had to be taken out.  His surgery was August 3 and he stayed at the hospital two nights.  He came through the surgery just fine.

In this picture, he is wearing the bandage that they devised for him at the pet hospital.  It turned out to be something like a small undershirt with the shoulder straps cut off, folded double lengthwise and holes cut out for the ears.  It was taped to his head with surgical tape wrapped around and around about 8 times.  When I had to change his bandage, I discovered that it wasn’t easy to put a new one on him.  I could not, even with help, get him neatly bandaged up like this.

On Friday, August 7, they took the drains out and he didn’t have to have the area bandaged any more.  He is doing fine now, and this morning he took the long walk with me.  He was ready to turn back before I was and I let him make the decision because he seems to know how much he can exercise.

The biopsy showed that the problem seems to stem from a rose fungus that he had a reaction to.  It’s bizarre kind of affliction, — that it would settle in a lymph node and cause it be become enlarged. There had been some speculation that it might be cancer.  Thank God that it wasn’t that.

I have one rose bush and a few time this summer I had tethered him to a stake in the ground beside that bush.   I won’t put him there again.  I may even cut that bush down.  It’s not all that pretty any way.  It started out as a pretty yellow rose and suddenly turned into a wild red rose.  Apparently the yellow rose was grafted onto a wild rose root and one winter, the yellow rose died, but the red rose root lived.

I think that Rusty looks kind of cute in his bandage helmet but I couldn’t make him look cute in the one I put on him.  He is really happy to have the bandage off now, and really, so am I.

These daisies are gloriously beautiful, and I think that inspired the name.  A friend gave me a clump of them and I planted them beside my arbor trellis, at the lower end.  They grew and bloomed there for a couple of years but dwindled away.  To my surprise, I now find small clumps of them growing in unexpected places.  There is one such clump at the edge of the Shasta Daisies beside my driveway, and another little clump beside the currant bush.  This plant is growing very near my burn ring.

I had brush to burn–berry bush canes, and tree branches–but I couldn’t burn it because the heat from the fire would surely affect the beautiful daisies, perhaps even kill them.  I decided to wait until after the flowers are done blooming before I would use the burn ring.

Then I received the advice that I could take the brush to the area behind the city garage and leave it there for them to dispose of.  Instead of burning the brush this year, I hauled it to the city brush pile.  The Gloriosa Daisy is still blooming beautifully.  I’m glad that I didn’t have to keep the brush until the daisy was finished blooming this year.  And, perhaps it will grow again in this same place.  It’s welcome to grow there, or in another spot in my flower beds if it would choose that.  It’s a beautiful flower.