This was the summer of finding things around here. If we'd had our Tarot cards read, maybe we'd have been told "what was lost will be found" or "all will be revealed."

For one thing Mr. Troutbend was poking around in the garage and found a Sears battery charger. It was pretty much in plain sight, under a weed eater, sure, but that weed eater had been moved around a time or two and this big box with the battery charger never made itself known until now, 8 years after my dad died and we took this place over.



It's a nice one with slow and fast charge features, plus a "Boost" mode that can be used to jump a car battery. There were at least 2 occasions in the past couple of years when I could have used it to get my car running, but I didn't know it was here. Now I do.

Another thing that turned up was some reflective tape, and before he left for Las Vegas, Mr. Troutbend told me to apply it to the gate at the top of the driveway. Although I know he would have done it very scientifically, measuring the lengths of tape as he cut them, and measuring the distance between each piece of tape, I just slapped them up there. I'm in a 'less than perfect' mode where I've decided it's more important to do something than over-think it and not do it at all.



I'm sad today because there is a dead mink over by the highway on the way to the post office. I don't know if he was hit by a car and made it off the road before he died, or died from other causes. I wanted to touch his fur to see how it feels, but decided not to because I don't know what he died of, and there's flies on him.