It was another dark and stormy night, but no tornados this time. The first thunderstorm wave creeped in at four in the morning and then hung around until past dawn. Then there was a brief lull, before the second wave came through and lasted throughout most of the day. Some wind and lots of rain, but nothing severe. Although, after the storms had pretty much passed, I stuck my head out on the back porch and noticed that a lot of tree limbs had fallen. Nothing super big, but about half-a-dozen good size branches that were scatter over the backyard. That was yesterday. Today, is delightfully cool and also much drier. What we call cabin weather. I collected and cut up all of the downed branches, making littles out of bigs. Unfortunately, I had already filled up the yard waste bucket, with trimmings before the storms, so I went shopping for yard waste bags. I first tried the grocery store, but they must consider the bags to be a seasonal item and they didn’t have any. Then I tried Menards. The Menard store is relatively new here. When we first bought our house there weren’t any big box hardware stores nearby and this was at a time when we were fairly active doing home improvement. Mainly there were only little mom and pop stores that were never open on Sunday and one nearby lumber yard that wasn’t open on the weekend at all. There was a Missouri based chain of big box hardware stores, called Central Hardware, that one of which was on the way home from work. The quality of their building supplies was pretty poor, but there weren’t any alternatives about, but Central Hardware went bankrupt in 1990. Eventually, a Home Depot was put in about a mile away from home and I was happy with that. Next came a Lowes, but we don’t shop there for political reasons. After the Menards was added, Anne informed me that Home Depot was now also politically verboten. The Menards is fine, except it is impossible to find anything there without asking someone. It does have one neat and unique feature, a pair of escalator-like ramps that can take shoppers with carts up and down, because it has a second floor. Today, I had to ask two people, before I finally found the yard waste bags. I bought two sets of bags, instead of just the one that I needed.