This made me think of something I'd forgotten. A few years ago when I went to my usual market, they were playing elevator musak on the loudspeaker. Somebody had picked out really prime stuff from my younger days, and I remember seeing a few people shuffling to the beat in the isles behind their carts. When I got to the checkout, the bagger was sort of twisting and humming and I KNEW THE WORDS! I started singing, he joined in and we did a duet, lol. I could hear chuckles from the captive audience behind us, and the smiles in their eyes told me they were "that" close to joining in. They should have. It's what we would have called a Happening in the sixties.

Here you go gloria, got this in an email a year or so ago. 15 Things to do at Wal-Mart while your spouse/partner is taking their sweet time: Get 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in people's carts when they aren't looking. Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals. 3 Make a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the rest rooms. 4 Walk up to an employee and tell him/her in an official tone, 'Code 3' in housewares..... and see what happens. 5 Go the Service Desk and ask to put a bag of M&M's on lay away. 6 Move a 'CAUTION - WET FLOOR' sign to a carpeted area. 7 Set up a tent in the camping department and tell other shoppers you'll invite them in if they'll bring pillows from the bedding department. 8 When a clerk asks if they can help you, begin to cry and ask 'Why can't you people just leave me alone?' 9 Look right into the security camera; use it as a mirror, and pick your nose. 10 While handling guns in the hunting department, ask the clerk if he knows where the anti- depressants are. 11 Dart around the store suspiciously loudly humming the "Mission Impossible" theme. 12 In the auto department, practice your "Madonna look" using different size funnels. 13 Hide in a clothing rack and when people browse through, say "PICK ME!" "PICK ME!" 14 When an announcement comes over the loud speaker, assume the fetal position and scream "NO! NO! It's those voices again!!!!" ( And; last, but not least!) 15 Go into a fitting room and shut the door and wait a while; and, then, yell, very loudly, "There is no toilet paper in here!" Now you've hurt yourself laughing AND wasted time reading this...shame on you!

valzone5 - LMAO!! I do believe they are meant to place hand towels in. :) That lovely piece of "furniture" has since left our home...well actually it sits in my garage begging to be burned. walkin yesindeed - I will gladly send you a big section framed once i get it pulled down! :)

Rebecca, I am happy your drought is gone too, but sorry this dreary weather contributes to your aches and pains. I am hoping for warmer, drier weather for all of us, but not sure when we are going to get it. January always seems like the dreariest month to me. Stock will grow here, but it is pretty picky, and I have better results from it when I plant it in October or November which is the same time here in my area that you can plant pansies, flowering kale, flowering cabbage, dianthus, and snapdragons. Stock is not only a cool-season plant, but it is a bit pickier about the cool weather than some other cool-season plants seem to be. For example, dianthus goes in and out of bloom cycles here pretty much year-round, whether the temperatures are high are low. Stock doesn't do that. Stock blooms when the weather is cool, period. I believe it has to have temperatures in the 60s in order to set flowers and bloom. Once your temperatures are hotter, then it is pretty much done. If you can find some transplants in flower or ready to flower and plant them in early Spring, you can get a few weeks to a few months of bloom from it if the weather cooperates. I like stock but don't plant it often in Spring as we get too hot too early down here most years. It also tolerates cold less well than the other plants I mentioned above, so may need to be covered up in the winter and early spring on nights going very far below 32 degrees. It will tolerate some light frosts but not real heavy ones. Lupines? I haven't tried the ones that grow in northern parts of the country as I don't think they'd do well in our hot summers but I grow the kind of lupines that God gave us....Lupinus texensis, aka Texas bluebonnets. They either are perennial here or reseed in our clay, and some years we get big stands of them and other years we have smaller stands. Our clay really is too dense for them here at our house and I knew that when I planted them, but I figured that maybe if I was foolish enough to sow the seeds and plant them here, then maybe they would be foolish enough to grow and bloom at least a little bit....and they do. I also have grown the red-flowered variety of Lupinus texensis called Alamo Fire and it does pretty well here. In our area, all kinds of Texas bluebonnets do better from seed sown in the fall than in the spring. The bluebonnet seeds have a hard shell and sprout sporadically over a period of a couple of years. I do see fairly large (maybe one gallon, maybe two gallon) pots of Russell hybrid type lupines in stores each spring. They have them around the same time they have delphiniums in bloom in large pots, so maybe in April. To me, these are the kinds of things you buy, bring home and plant for instant impact, and you do so knowing they are likely to be relatively short-lived in our heat. If you don't expect them to thrive and flourish in our heat and can be content just to enjoy them while they last, I don't see anything wrong with buying them and planting them. I suppose they could be a big disappointment if a person bought them thinking they would bloom all summer. Yet, you never know---what if we had a cooler than average summer and they did bloom and survive? Cool summers aren't common here, but we had one in 2015. Nancy, I've grown Drummond's Phlox here and it did okay, but not well enough that I continued growing it. Drummond's Phlox is one of the smaller varieties and it needs well-drained sandy soil (which I really cannot give it). As for the taller garden type phlox, there's a handful of heirloom types that thrive here---we had someone in our neighborhood in Ft Worth whose home was just surrounded by the old magenta-flowering one grown back in the 1960s and prior. I don't know the name of it. There's a few of the taller garden phlox, like the variety "David", bred to be mildew-tolerant, but I haven't grown any of those. Jennifer, We have a fenced chicken run. We always have had one. I wouldn't have a chicken coop without one. I believe our run with the only coop now in use (we have four coops, and each has a fully enclosed chicken run) is 10' x 20' and it is fully covered in sturdy fencing, including a fence type roof. The chickens are fine when they are in it, but they hate being confined because they are used to free-ranging. I think that if they never were allowed to free-range, they wouldn't know what they were missing and they'd be content to be in the chicken run. We have lost more chickens to predators in the last 5 years than we did in the first 15 years, and I'm just done with that. If we buy more chickens, they are not going to be allowed to free range because it really is just setting them up to eventually become some predator's meal. Our predator problem probably is 20 times worse now than it was when we moved here. As land a few miles from us continues to develop, the wildlife gets pushed upriver to us. We have to change how we manage our chickens, or there's no point in having them any more. Tim is gone from home roughly 14 hours a day on work days, so he barely sees the chickens except on weekends and he is out of touch with our current reality with regards to the predator issues. I wish we were in a nice, quiet semi-rural neighborhood where chickens can free range and be relatively safe within their own yard, but we live in a wildlife jungle. It would help if I could convince him to fence our entire yard, but he hates fences with a passion. I don't know how to have chickens any more without an 8' tall fence around the whole yard. Dawn