kistaro

So after dinner, my parents and I went out to do various pending errands we had. (I tagged along out of raw, unadulterated boredom.) So after the run to FedEx for my father to ship more orders he recieved, we went down to Office Depot and Dierberg's- they're in the same strip mall, so my father and I opted for the former while my mother went to the latter. My father and I spent 15 minutes figuring out where they'd moved the copy machine he wanted to buy- they'd rearranged the entire electronics section overnight, owing to replacing large portions of the floor. I found it, wandered around to satisfy my irrational attraction to writing instruments (I hoard things...), found a particularly good variety of pen for college use to be on 2-for-1 special. Spent five bucks, fulfilled addiction.

My father got his copy machine (the old one of nine years finally bit it this morning) and a carton of paper. After he drove the car around to in front of the store, I wheeled out the cart containing the paper while a worker at the store handled our copy machine. My father loaded the paper and put the cart back up.

Now let's stop this oh-so-exciting narrative to describe the Office Depot. It's got this area for carts to be returned to, and it's the only flat area on the sidewalk-thing; everything else is tilted shalowly towards the sharply angled wheelchair ramp.

He didn't put the cart in the right place- he just got it out of his way. So about twenty seconds later, it came back to us at about warp six; I was the only one in the position to grab it before it smashed the my father, the worker, and the copy machine. I grabbed it from the side, slowing it enough that my father could grab it from the front without injury. I pinched every finger on my right hand, and my middle finger is now sporting a band-aid (it's amazing how profusely a finger wound can bleed- and how quickly I heal), but everybody's okay and my father learned an important lesson about parking wheeled things in sloped places: don't be at the bottom of the slope. Or something.

Went to meet my mother at Dierberg's, nothing eventful, headed back home. I saw a few lightning bugs (fireflies to some of you)- which is good; there were almost none last year. I'm glad to see that it seems some survived the mosquito spraying. Yay for insects with flashing butts!... or something.

And the cherry tree outside is almost ripe. The squirrels have been having their feasts, but in the upper branches we can't reach anyway- and there are enough leftover cherries from last year's record harvest that we'll almost certainly have very natural cherry pie again this year. (Very organic cherries: not only do we not use chemicals in the raising of the tree, we use the classic age-old method of "total neglect." And yet, somehow, the tree does absolutely fine...)