Saturday spottings (fields of clover)

I mean, it's everywhere: purple molehill majesties, strutting their stuff before the serious greening starts in. After a year and a half of obsessive (and none too inexpensive) weed treatments, I managed not to have any of it this year, although the clover might be preferable to the occasional bare spots.

Seen at 38th and May: an actual lemonade stand, manned by a couple of kids, with adults watching from the wings. I caught a glimpse of it only in passing, but I'm guessing it was some sort of charity fundraiser, perhaps sponsored by the state Baptists, who own the building on that corner.

I'm trying to get a fix on one aspect of grocery-shopper behavior. For most things, I go to the Crest store at 23rd and Meridian; some items it doesn't carry I find at the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market at 23rd and Pennsylvania. These stores are about three miles apart, and their demographics are roughly similar, with the Wal-Mart having a few more Asians, the Crest a few more Latinos. Ethnicity, however, likely doesn't explain this: at Crest, just about every last shopping cart is returned to the racks in the parking lot, while at Wal-Mart about a third of them are strewn about the lot, seemingly randomly. For now, I'm thinking that it's simply a matter of staff attention: I almost always see someone rounding up the baskets at Crest, and if I see him, someone else does too, and maybe that someone else is thus motivated to leave his cart in the proper place to be picked up. I seldom see anyone policing up the Wal-Mart lot. If you have a better explanation, I'd like to hear it.

Note to Casual Male XL: You cater to, well, XL guys. Is it really wise to push the racks so close together that we can't get between them without knocking something off a hanger?

Hummer H2 and H3 models have largely supplanted the original H1 bruiser, which is no longer being sold at retail. Still, almost 12,000 H1s were built, and one of them today turned up at Circuit City, its driver deftly managing to squeeze its 86.5-inch width into a suddenly-undersized parking space while I watched from the next row. (My own car, which strikes me occasionally as Too Darn Big, is a mere 70.2 inches across.) Nicely done, although the image of a Disneyfied dancing elephant stayed with me all the way across the Northwest Distressway.

Posted at 6:12 PM to City Scene