Monday July 19th 2021

The forecast for today was for more than the normal amount of thunderstorms, but so far it has been about average around here. After a bright sunny morning, a thunderstorm moved through in the early afternoon. A cloudy sky filled the remainder of the day with more thunderstorms do overnight.

I got an early start this morning. The goal was to restock my food supply. My last major grocery shopping run was a month ago with one quick stop for meat, bread, milk and such almost three weeks ago. I was raiding the freezer, can goods and back of the shelf items for the last few days. The nearest Walmart was about eight miles away on the north side of Interstate 12. A Walmart Neighborhood Grocery store and a Winn Dixie were much closer, but I needed to pick up some hardware items as well. Getting stuck in traffic after days in a quiet country setting was my reward.

The store was busy with customers and Walmart employees. There were lots of employees in the aisles filling blue carts for customer pickup and others were restocking shelves. Navigating up and down the rows of food was difficult in the congestion. I got everything on my list, but didn’t refill all of the extra stock I went through in the last few days. Another week is probably all I can go before my next provisioning trip.

Both of my daily walks around the state park were after the thunderstorms. I still needed to stay on the paved surfaces. The grass areas are all flooded and rapidly turning to mud. The camp hosts tried to stay with their lawn mowing schedule this morning. I think they spent more time getting the mower unstuck from the mud than actually cutting grass. The nice green grass was filled with black mud holes and muddy tire tracks when they got done.