July 30 & 31

July 30 Today began with our usual breakfast with friends at Dahl’s. Discussion centered on the family and friends who were hospitalized. Seems that at this stage of life, most people we know either are going through or have gone through some very serious hospitalizations. Having said that, we thank God every day for our lives and the overflowing blessings that He provides.

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We had an unusual occurrence while we were at Dahl’s. Ella saw the display of Dr. Pepper at 4 12pks for $5. Always one to take advantage of a sale, we went to the display and discovered that they had no 12pks there and only 6pks. We assumed that meant 2 6pks equals 1 12pk and took enough to equal the 4 12pks. When we reached the checkout, we were charged $10. I explained (several times) to the clerk that, yes we had 8 6pks but that only equaled 4 12pks, which would be $5. She got that “deer in the headlights look” and just froze. One of the other clerks came over and we explained it all to her. She in turn got a manager. Once we explained it to him, he said that the sign was in error and should have read “4 6pks for $5”. In the mean time the 2nd clerk had gone to the display and returned with the signs, which clearly read “4 12pks for $5”. The manager apologized for the confusion and restated that it was 4 6pks for $5 not 4 12pks. I told them to keep them and just ring out the rest of our purchase adding that I’d never been someplace that didn’t honor their signs. After we had paid for our purchase the manager came back and gave us the 8 6pks and said, “These are on me.” So we ended up with 8 6pks at $0 and didn’t pay the deposit. Now that is a better bargain than what we thought we were going to get.

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We drove home from the store in a tropical downpour. You know, one of those where it rains so hard that you can’t see and the roads are running curb deep in water. It lasted less than a half hour but that was enough! After that the rest of the day was mostly overcast and cool. Just before I went to work at 3:30 there was another brief, hard rain. The rest of the evening was uneventful.



July 30

I was a little surprised when I went outside this morning. We had a blanket of fog in the air. I took some pictures on my Blackberry and will post them when I upload this entry.

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As an aside: this Dell laptop drives me to distraction at times. The touchpad is between my hands as I type and I occasionally touch it while typing. This leads to me typing words into a different part of the text. I think that I’ve always caught it. However, if you are reading this blog and find some strange sentence structure, it might be because of the touchpad and its tricks.

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Well my 5 grain hot cereal is ready so I’m going to eat breakfast and then read my RV Travel newsletter. Later!

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When I returned to this computer, the screen saver was doing a slide show of photos I have stored here. It was going through pics of a family reunion from a August 2006. Ella and I were there with my sister, my nieces and nephews and their kids and grandkids. It reminds me of what a large family we are. And by large I mean more than just number. I mean height and breadth of us as individuals are well above the norm. My family seems to fall into two categories: tall and heavy or tall and thin. That’s me on the far left. I’m 6’1” and (at that time) over 300 lbs. you’ll notice that I’m neither the tallest nor the heaviest one in the picture.

Looking at these pictures also reminds me that I still had some dark hair at that time. True, the hair was on the back of my head where I couldn’t see it but it was there. I thinking that it isn’t nearly as dark back there now. Also, at that time Ella was wearing her hair short (maybe and inch to an inch and a half). Judging from the length of her hair now, that must have been about the time she started letting it grow.