Did you remember to call your Mom this weekend and say “Happy Mother’s Day!”? I did. I almost didn’t because I didn’t want anything from her. I thought me calling her without wanting anything would be too much of a shock and I didn’t want to kill my Mom with shock on Mother’s Day with a phone call. But I called anyway and she didn’t die. So there’s that.
Since we have a Mother-type person right here at Rancho DeDay, we celebrated Mother’s Day here too. I cooked her dinner on the grill. Grilled chicken breasts. Nothing says “Mother’s Day” quite like a couple of breasts for dinner. It would have been more fun if the kids weren’t around, but without the kids we wouldn’t be celebrating Mother’s Day, just Sunday With No Kids and Breasts. It’s sort of a Catch 22 there. It would have also been even more fun if I had propane for the grill. (Everyone who’s about to tell me “The only real grilling is charcoal grilling!”, just shut up now and save everyone time.) It’s not so much fun to grill when right after the grill gets hot the flame goes poof! and stops flaming. I had new, non-cancerous grill guts, but no propane. That sucked. But I did have a little table-top grill that takes those little propane tanks. And I had a couple of the little propane tanks I use with my camping stove. So after the big grill’s flame went poof! and stopped flaming, I got out the little grill and cooked on that. But it was taking forever, so I finished up by pan-searing the chicken inside on the oven. On the griddle on the oven, (by which I really mean “stovetop”) not straight on the burners because that would have made a huge mess. I plan to go get the tank filled up with new propane today or tomorrow. That doesn’t help me for last night, but I’ll be ready for Next Time. So there’s that.
For dessert we went to the local ice cream parlor, which isn’t a parlor at all so much as a giant ice-cream-cone-shaped building they sell ice cream out of. And Black Cows. You can also get Black Cows at the ice cream place. I like Black Cows. The ice cream was nice because it was hot that day. The thermometer at the ice cream place said 91º, but I’m not sure if it was really 91º because it’s really in the ice cream place’s best interest for their thermometer to say it’s hotter than it really is. That way, if you drive by and see the ice cream place’s thermometer and it says it’s 91º you might say “Geez it’s hot!” and stop in for ice cream even if it really isn’t 91º. But it was hot and we got ice cream. So there’s that.
“What’s this about gardening you mentioned in the Title, but haven’t mentioned yet in the thread here yet?” you ask. Well, that was Saturday. The Little Woman wanted to put a few more plants in on Sunday, so there was some gardening done on Mother’s Day. I also put in my vegetable garden in on Sunday. Both plants. The big tomato plant and the cherry tomato plant. My whole “truck garden” cost me almost two smackoleans and I brought it home in the drink holders of the car. But we did some gardening on Mother’s Day. The boy’s played in their wading pool instead of gardening. With actual water in the pool so it was more fun. That was Sunday. Back on Saturday we did a big ol’ batch of cultivating. See, the Little Woman wanted to put in a flower bed by the new dog fence (which I just finished Thursday… sorta), so we went to the hardware store for supplies. After I cut the grass. And put in some landscaping blocks under the dog fence gate so Lucy couldn’t just duck under it anymore. She’s just a little dog and if there’s a hole more than four inches in any direction, well, it’s like there’s no fence even there. And since we really wanted the dogs to stay out of most of the yard so the boys could play in a Poop Free Zone, a working fence is really what we wanted. So that meant I had to place some blocks under the gate, so now it’s Lucy Resistant Fencing. (I’d say “Lucy Proof”, but who would I be kidding?) So after I got done mowing the grass and blocking up the bottom of the gate (so it was really “blocking down” since it was on the bottom) and had my shower so I’d stop being stinky I was told “it’s time to Do Something About the Flower Bed”. So much for lazing around Saturday afternoon. So there’s not that.
It was off to the hardware store with us to pick up the necessary supplies for a “Raised Bed”. Only when we got there someone noticed how stinking expensive plain ol’ dirt is. So she changed her mind and decided to go with a regular ground level flower bed. But she got extra dirt to go on our regular yard dirt. This is supposed to make our flowers better, but so far I haven’t seen any difference. Maybe once the seeds pop out of the ground as actual flowers I’ll notice a difference. But don’t count on it. She also got some wild flower seeds which, as it happens, are pretty much just like the wild flower seeds she already had at home but forgot all about. Then it was time to go back home and start tilling up the ground. Well, not right away. I couldn’t start tilling until the Little Woman chopped out all the grass where she wanted the garden with the weed whacker. She took three minutes whacking the grass and then I got to till for like 17 hours until the “tilth” (look it up) was to her liking. OK, it wasn’t a full 17 hours, but it was a long time. There was the breaking the ground up with a shovel so the tiller could get a grip, then there was the “rough” tilling and then another pass to break up the larger clods into smaller clods and then another pass yet to break the smaller clods into clod-free dirt and then I turned some store-bought dirt into out free range dirt. Then I had to pull out a bunch of landscaping blocks from the pile we made when we took out the “pond” the other people left when we moved in. The flower garden is all done now. It looks like a bunch of dirt. But I got my marigolds planted this year. So there’s that.
What I’m really saying after all that is I spent a lot of time outside this past weekend. I’ve got a good start on my farmer’s tan for the year. Chicks dig farmer’s tans. Right?
-Rue.
He had obviously worked very hard and took a lot of time. It said “I love you, Mommy” and “Happy Mothers Day” in macaroni and had a big heart with red macaronis in the center. All this would have definitely registered high on the “AW” scale except for the fact that the prince is almost 21. But, hey, he put a lot into it and, as Rue says, there is that.