Train on my walk today… Hoping the graffiti isn’t profane.

Ten minutes of writing.

Ten minutes of writing whatever comes, and I will post it as my blog entry this week, just as it is.

(Mostly as it is. I edited a little. Because. You know! Recovering English major and middle school English teacher!)

My former neighbor who is a professional photographer came by earlier this week to take my son’s senior pictures. We didn’t have to go far; just into our backyard. She said that backyard pictures are always the best, and it doesn’t even matter what the yard looks like. It can be weeds and old tires, but there’s something about the way that folks feel more comfortable there that makes the pictures special.

So I danced around like a wild mother, behind him (but out of camera view), in front of him, trying to make him laugh. She got a couple of shots with him smiling (maybe even laughing): his beautiful, natural grin.

She had him sit on an old stump in the backyard and then in front of the quince bush and wild grapevines. Later we moved to the corner of the yard. She had him pick up our good dog, and had me get in a picture with him, too, just for a moment.

She knows what she’s doing.

I am excited to see the photos.

I also was a wild errand runner that day. I drove down to Walmart and returned some aromatherapy oils that I bought for massages that ended up smelling like arm pit. (Not really… but they didn’t smell right to me). Also, two t-shirts that I bought for my daughter a year ago that we thought she could wear to work but that weren’t allowed. Got $1.00 back for each one of those. Pretty much the principle of the thing, not the money so much. Then off to Home Depot to redeem a strange gift card. There is a story behind it. In brief: I bought something at the Depot. I paid using a debit card that I received as a rebate after buying my dog’s heartworm medication. I later returned the thing to the Depot. They said, “Back on the card?” and I said in my cheerful way, “Sure!”

Except I had thrown away the annoying rebate debit card as soon as I used it, and it was gone, gone, gone. After I realized this, I went back to the Depot, and they said. “Well. This is a problem.” But finally, in the end, the head of all head cashiers came and signed my receipt and said it was worth $25 with his name and the date.

I wasn’t sure how that was going to go over when I finally needed to redeem it.

But I found mulch on sale that wasn’t dyed, that smelled like earth, for around $3.00 a bag, and loaded up my cart and prepared myself for all kinds of difficulty in redeeming my receipt that basically said, “Give this nice lady $25 in merchandise, please.”

And guess what?

It worked perfectly.

I said, “Really? That was so easy!”

And the cashier said, “Yep. No problem! That’s the head cashier’s signature with his number. If this was a fake, you wouldn’t know what the number was.”

So now I have seven bags of lovely smelling mulch to distribute around the yard, and a bag of decorative gourds, because I love them and wanted to spend a little more than the $25, just because it seemed tacky not to.

Senior pictures and a car load of mulch and a few bags of miscellaneous returned to Walmart that had been in my car for weeks, including t-shirts that had been riding around back there for more than a year.  With the added bonus that I got some money back.

It was a good day.