Just a Rambling Sunday **(EDITED)**

Seems like I've been running at full speed all day today.  Well, maybe that's because I have been!

 

I went to the booth to take more pachinko balls and rearrange a bit, we're going to rearrange the entire booth in the next week or so but I like to go by and neaten up every few days.  I didn't get there until Friday of last week but I went by today and I'll go by a couple of times during the week.

 

I had a bunch of errands, none of them were very big but it seemed like each one took me forever to get through.  I went to the Dollar Store which should have been a short trip, but they were very crowded for a Sunday.  WalMart was it's usual self, but that was not unexpected.  It was that sort of day, and I am pretty tired!

 

Bill mowed the lawn, which it needed badly.  I worked on weeding the rock garden a done a few other things outside.  There is a local garden show on one of the Tulsa radio stations on Saturday mornings.  I usually try to listen to it whenever I can.  Sometimes I learn things, sometimes it's just fun.  Like the time the expert was taking calls on the best way to rid your garden of gnomes.  My favorite answer was the caller who suggested a golf club!  Usually, it's real stuff.  Like yesterday.  One of the callers was talking about a wild morning glory vine that he simply could not get rid of and had been fighting for a couple of years.  Except that what he was dealing with is actually a non-native, invasive species called Field Bindweed.  Which looks almost exactly like morning glory, and may be a related plant.  Guess what we have in the yard that we've always thought was morning glory?  Yep, Field Bindweed.  They are pretty so we aren't worried about them, if we had a garden or something like that then it might be a problem.  The blooms are pretty, blue is predominately what we have.  One of the characteristics of this plant is that is chokes out just about everything it grows near - which is probably why we've never had much success with the morning glories we've planted over the years; we thought we had infected or weak seeds but they were probably healthy after all.  However, the honeysuckle is a lot stronger than the Field Bindweed and has just about taken over the entire trellis Bill built by the deck a few years back.  The Field Bindweed is not something we're going to worry about, it's pretty and we'll leave it alone but the honeysuckle we planted on the back trellises will probably take care of any of it that grows back there.  The honeysuckle vines are growing very well and the deck plants are covered in blooms.  Smells heavenly!

 

Otter got to sleep in today.  Her specific intentions when she got home from work last night at 8:00 were to stay up as late as she could (I think she made it until about 2:00 a.m.) and then to sleep as late as she could today.  I was running my errands when she got up, she texted me just as I was about to pull into the driveway.  She got up a little after noon.  The reason is that she went into work tonight at 6:00 p.m. and will be there for several hours.  They are doing inventory and it may well be an all-nighter.  More of less, they should be done by 2:00 a.m. or hopefully before.  The manager is going to feed them pizza and they do get paid for the hours they are there.  She usually drives Bill's impala, but she said the blinkers might have been acting up yesterday so we told her to take my car tonight.  She is to text or call me if she feels that she can't drive home safely, no matter what time it is.  But we think she'll be fine.  She is not scheduled for work tomorrow, none of the employees working tonight are on the schedule.  She gave me strict instructions not to wake her up in the morning when I leave for work!

 

I made pinto beans this afternoon.  A huge pot.  We each had a bowl tonight, I have 8 2-cup containers in the freezer for lunches, a several cup container in the deep freeze and a huge bowl in the refrigerator which will last for several days.  I like to "cook big" when I can!  I had a lot of ham bits which came off of the ham we had at Easter, I froze a large Ziploc bag of them with the intention of making beans.  I just intended to make them earlier, but I never had time until today.

 

Movie Review:  Saving Mr. Banks.  It's the story of Walt Disney's attempt to convince the author of the Mary Poppins book to allow him to turn her story into a movie.  It was pretty good, Tom Hanks was wonderful as Walt Disney.

 

Also, Otter has other news.  She got a promotion at work and there is a raise with it.  She's now the Pricing Coordinator, and she will have duties with inventory control as well as cashier.  I bought her a small, single-serve cake piece at the grocery store the other day.  She had it for breakfast the next day - she is her Mother's Daughter, after all! :)

**EDIT**:  Otter did not work all night after all.  The assistant manager had some of the employees start the inventory around 3:00, so when Otter went in at 6:00 p.m. quite a bit of it was done already.  She texted me that they thought they'd be done by midnight.  But she was done with her part by 10:00 p.m., so she actually got home at a "early" hour.  Of course, she was still pretty caffeinated since she'd been prepared for an all-nighter!  I don't know what time she went to sleep last night (It's Monday morning now), but she was probably up for at least a couple of hours after we went to bed about 11:15.