Actually it was a sorta busy day. It surely wasn’t a day of Hurculean busy-ness, but a bunch of things happened. Luckily they happened all in a row rather than all at the same time. If they happened all at the same time that would have just been crazy. I’m sure whole whacks of things happened Saturday all at the same time, but not to me. I mean, can you image eating cheese conies while you rototill a garden in the hardware store? No? Me either.
But let’s go back, back to the beginning. The Earth had just formed a molten hot ball out of the cosmic dust… naw, let’s jump forward a little. (By “jump forward a little” I mean all the way to Saturday morning. That’s really more of a “big” jump.) Saturday morning dawned bright and clear. I guess. It was bright and clear when I got up anyway. Then, after a good breakfast (those cinnamon rolls that come in the tube with the icing you put on them yourself, plus orange juice) it was off to Skippy’s house. He has this garden in his backyard and he wants to plant things in it only the dirt needs to be turned over and broken up. He didn’t want to just use his Garden Claw, which would work but would take, like, forever. Like me and the bow saw not too long ago. So I let him borrow my tiller, which was nearly the least I could do. The least I could do would be to let him drive over and get it out of my garage and not call the cops on him for stealing my stuff right out of my garage. But I took it to him, because I’m nice that way.
I wasn’t really sure how much good having the tiller at his house was really going to do ol’ Skippy. I hadn’t used the tiller since the middle of last summer and it was sitting in my garage all that time. With gas in the tank. Just sitting. This is supposed to be Bad since the gas can… I don’t know what the gas can do, but you’re not supposed to just let things sit in your garage for months and months with gas in the tank because something bad will happen and the thing won’t start and you’ll have to take it to “the shop” where they’ll do something and you have to give them money but then your thing will start again and you’ll learn a lesson. (Namely: Never just leave stuff sit in your garage for months and moths at a time because something will happen to the gas and your thing won’t start.) But as things turned out, the tiller started right up. Well, not right up. I had to pull the starting cord all of four times. Then it started. Then we (really Skippy, but I watched) tilled Skippy’s garden. Luckily he got everything ready before I got there so the tilling went smoothly. You know, chopped down the big weeds and stuff. Only, ha!, no he didn’t. He “got ready” in the sense he was out of bed when I got there. So the first pass with the tiller was to chop down all the weeds which conveniently wrapped themselves around the blades of the tiller so we could just stop the thing and pull the blades off and untangle the weeds and put the blades back on and go back to tilling. Finally his garden was ready to plant. So I trimmed his dog’s toenails.
The toenail thing has nothing to do with his garden, but I was there and I’m good at dog toenail trimming, so I did it for him. I did it for Skippy, but to Shilo, who isn’t a “him” anyway and if you knew that, the “I did it for him” might confuse you since you might think I did it for a boy dog when Skippy only has two girl dogs. “Why didn’t I trim the toenails on both dogs?” you ask. Because his other dog is easy to trim and Skippy did it himself. He saved the hard dog for me.
Then we went out to lunch. I had two cheese conies and Skippy had a three-way. If you had dirty thoughts when I said Skippy had a “three-way”, you don’t come from Cincinnati. A Cincinnati three-way is chili spaghetti with cheese on it. Not that other thing you were thinking of. After lunch we hung out at Skippy’s house for a while. I didn’t want to go right home because the Little Woman had that look in her eye like she wanted to get stuff done around the house. I thought I’d just stay out of her way.
When I got home, and Andrea told me the tub was leaking. No, that was last week. When I got home, I went to the hardware store to check out the fencing so we can put up a little dog fence to keep half the yard clean so the boys can play and not get poop on themselves. At least in theory. I now have A Plan for the fence. We’ll see what becomes of it.
Then it was dinner time.
After dinner I replaced all the cancerous parts in my grill for shiny new parts. A complete Grill Gut Transplant operation. When I was done with that and hooked up the gas again and lit it, nothing blew up. I declared the operation a success!
While the Little Woman watched the kids play outside I thought it would be a good idea to sit in the recliner and read a magazine. Lucy had other ideas. She thought it would be a good idea for me to clean up dog puke. She even planned ahead. After I changed out the cancerous grill guts but before I cleaned up my work area (I finally just ShopVacced my backyard), she gobbled up as much of the petrified grill grease and gunk as she could gobble up. This turned out to be a lot of gobbling. I know it was a lot from the spectacular pile of greasy black grill gunk puke she left on the new carpet in the middle of living room. I think the only worse possible stain would be heavily used motor oil mixed with spray paint. Huge, huge mess. But I cleaned it all out of the carpet. And Lucy didn’t die, which was a distinct possibility when the Little Woman saw the mess when she got in with the kids. And the cleaning wasn’t like just spraying some carpet cleaner on it and then sweeping it up once the foam dried and it was all better. The foam carpet cleaner was about useless. I had to employ nearly every cleaning agent in my rather extensive cleaner arsenal. The foam cleaner, the steam cleaning machine, the spray carpet cleaner, a scrub brush, wet rags, dry rags, damp rags and my secret weapon. Actually I didn’t know I had a “secret weapon” carpet cleaner until Saturday night. But now I do. All® Free Clear Ultra Fabric Detergent. It has Stainlifters™.
Before anything else could happen, I went to bed. It seemed like a good plan, and I stick by my decision.
-Rue.
But my yard is clean!
