I have been writing down little tidbits for Randomly Thinking but have not had much inclination to finalize them. It’s either been too hot or too rainy or I’ve been too tired. But this week I needed some cheering up and figured others might too.

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I read a short romance this past week and in the book the main character gets dumped and not just dumped anywhere. He gets dumped at church.

I sent a note to the author on Instagram.

“I’m not done with the book yet but Cynthia dumped Joe at church. At church. Girl is brutal.”

I told my husband about this dumping scene, and he asked if I planned to dump him during the upcoming weekend when he got baptized. I told him, “Absolutely.”

I was like, “Yep. As soon as they bring you back up out of that water, I’m going to stand up and pump my fists and say, ‘Yes! Glad you got Jesus because you ain’t got me! I’m out looooser!”

We’ll be married 19 years in five more days. I’m lucky he still appreciates my odd sense of humor.

***

Smalltown life is interesting. In a good way. Mostly.

A couple of weeks ago we attended the town dairy festival, because we live in a town where they still celebrate dairy (even as our dairy farms are being forced to shut down).

It poured the entire parade. The local high school band couldn’t perform so the parade was mainly fire trucks, a few floats that focused on dairy consumption, a herd of Jersey cows from a friend of mine being led through town, and the color guard. When the fire trucks came through we figured that was the end because that’s usually what is at the end of a parade around here — a ton of fire trucks from all over the area, blowing their horns and sounding their sirens. This time, though, the parade restarted. Like the color guard came around again as if we were in a time loop.

My son called out, “Oh no! They’re stuck in a time loop! You have to try to get out! Try do something you didn’t do the first time around!”

It was hilarious. To me and my family anyhow. I’m so sure those around us were that amused, but who knows. A lot of people have lost their sense of humor these days.

What I’m really looking forward to is the outhouse races in August. They are held during Founder’s Days. I’ve always heard about the races but never been privy to them. Privy. Get it? Privy . . . Yeah. I know. That was bad. But anyhow, I’m looking forward to the day and will be sure to take some photos of it for all of you.

They don’t race to the outhouse, by the way. They build outhouses and people carry them while one person sits inside and they literally race them down the street. I’ve lived in this area my whole life and have never seen an outhouse race. But now we live right here in town so it’s my chance. What a disappointment last year, our first year here, when the event was canceled due to You Know What.

There is also a contest where someone is crowned the winner of the toilet seat cover painting contest. The paintings are very professional, so don’t let the name fool you. They hang the winners up in the local diner. The one with the stuffed six-foot black bear that overlooks diners.

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It’s been hot the last several days. Hot and muggy mixed with afternoon thunderstorms. Little Miss and I snuck off to my parents to enjoy the above ground pool by dad installed many years ago, originally for my son. We like to take Zooma the Wonderdog with us but it’s hard to keep an eye on her while we are in the pool. She likes to run across the small dirt road, into the field by the pond, which wouldn’t be bad if cars didn’t fly up and down the road extremely fast. I’m always worried she will get hurt.

I had an extra lead to keep her tied to the pool so she would be close to us but it turned out to be very short. I finally gave up and let her roam but then called for her every five minutes to make sure she hadn’t gone into the road.

She was hilarious because she would sit by the pool, panting, looking innocent, for the longest time and then I would go back to swimming with Little Miss, pop up a few minutes later and she was gone. She’d wander back when I called her though, always looking innocent, wagging her tail. I feel like she’s saying to me, “What? I’ve been here the whole time. Why are you looking at me that way?”

***

Speaking of heat, I told my husband the other day that he shouldn’t mow the lawn around 3 because it was the hottest time of the day.

“No. Noon is the hottest time of the day,” he informed me, very confident.

“No. Around 2 or 3 is the hottest time,” I informed him.

I looked it up online and found this answer from The Farmer’s Almanac: “The hottest time of the day is around 3 p.m. Heat continues building up after noon, when the sun is highest in the sky, as long as more heat is arriving at the earth than leaving. By 3 p.m. or so, the sun is low enough in the sky for outgoing heat to be greater than incoming. Sometimes the hottest time is earlier because a weather system moves in with cool air early in the day.”

It was nice to finally be write about something scientific for once.

***

We watched a couple classic movies this past week. One of them was The Birds. This was a movie I avoided watching for my entire life based on something that happened in my childhood. My mom was outside mowing the lawn one day when I heard the lawn mower shut off and she came running inside.

“The birds!” she cried. “The birds are attacking!”

She was swiping at her hair with her arms over her head and shaking her head.

“It was just like that Alfred Hitchcock movie! It was crazy!”

It turns out some barn swallows were swooping down on her while she was on the riding mower just like, yes, The Birds. She believes they were trying to protect their nests. Whatever was happening, her declaration forever solidified in my mind that The Birds was a movie not to be watched.

But I finally did watch it and despite the fact the birds were super fake, it was pretty traumatizing to see and did leave me very leery of any birds gathering. One day, several years ago, at our old house I walked out to the back door and the entire back yard, our neighbors’ roof, and their backyard was full of birds. Had I seen this movie before then, I would have been even more freaked out than I was that day.

***

We had our first real thunderstorm experience on the hill in our new house last Tuesday night. The storm raged for three hours. Lightening lit up the sky from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. and thunder rattled the house. It was absolutely crazy. We lived in a literal Valley before we moved here, so we were somewhat shielded from storms there. When we did get them, they were fairly quick and mild. We rarely heard loud cracks of thunder there.

The worst storm I remembered there involved insane wind and a tornado touching down a few miles away. Two hundred foot, hundred-year-old trees were ripped out of the ground in our town and scattered like matchsticks. Then there was the year it rained for a week.

The entire downtown flooded and destroyed homes and businesses. It was surreal. There used to be marks on the walls that marked where Hurricane Agnes hit in 1972. Those records were obliterated by Hurricane Sandy, something I thought I’d never see in my lifetime.

***

As I was preparing this post last night, we had a power outage, something that also happens more often where we live now. It’s sort of odd, though. We will have power outages after you would think you would have them. In the winter we had one after the major snowstorms moved through. Last week we had weird storms all week long and no power outage, other than a few seconds. This power outage came in the middle of a very hot day and wiped out power for most of our county (which is about 6,000 people. Yes. That is how small our county is) for about eight hours.

***

I made a mistake recently of asking someone I don’t know to review my book. Monday she messaged me cheerfully on Instagram that she had reviewed the book. She acted like it was something to be excited about. I have been trying not to look at reviews but I did, against my better judgement, and saw she had left me a two star review and proceeded to shred my book, inferring things that weren’t even there. I was a bit in shock that she had made it a point to tell me to go look at the review (essentially). I suppose she wanted me to know how bad and evil she thought my book was and I doubt she was prepared for the message she got back from me, asking her if she was so worried about me being a “bad Christian” how did she think she was being a good one by making sure I saw a mean review. The power outage was welcome because I was obsessing over this girl and what had made her think she was so above everyone else and was really considering messaging her again. It wouldn’t have helped anything anyhow. She felt how she felt and it can’t be helped. The outage made me take a breather and pray for forgiveness instead of figuring out how to blast her again.

***

So those are my random thoughts for the week. How about you? Any random thoughts to share? Let me know in the comments.