Emeline and I are not having a great start to our day together. I suspect Matilda is doing a Round Robin on crankiness regarding sartorial choices.

Yardwork weekend, yay! Yesterday: laying sod and sowing grass seed, making a new bed for flowers and tomatoes on the sunny side of the house, sawing and placing logs to edge the beds, spreading pine needles (I hate mulch), planting bulbs and transplanting rose bushes (fingers crossed for survival). After all the work, I slept real good last night! But, man, stiff and sore this morning. Today: filled in a sloping end of the new bed with soil, repaired the slowly-warping-and-collapsing fence (two inches inside my property line, built but not maintained by the neighboring apartment complex) (Thanks for the fence!), scavenged some bricks for patio edging from the huge empty lot behind the neighbor's house, installed splashguards under the gutters, and then, when my sister's boyfriend retired to the couch to watch basketball, she and I snuck onto the apartment complex property to pull a couple dead limbs out of the big magnolia tree there. She ended up climbing into the tree to saw one dangling branch the rest of the way off with my little four-inch wood saw. Yes, we know it was trespassing etc. But the dying part of the tree faces my house, and their lawn-maintenance crew was ignoring it, and the weight of the dead limbs was going to kill the branches they were laying on. So. We rescued the tree. I don't think anyone even saw us. Then it started to rain and we decided the shrub trimming could wait. So now they're off back to Yorktown, and I'm waiting for the lawn guy, who conveniently turned out to be an electrician in his day job, to come by and replace my tarnished brass outside lights with the classy black ones I bought yesterday while trolling Lowes.

And hello to everyone! Ginger, did you find the severed end of your finger? Did they sew it back on? Is it evil now?

I hit the end on the slicing blade of the food processor, which was on when it shouldn't have been, because it's old and jury-rigged. It was extremely stupid and also makes me queasy to think about.

Team hydrocodone is falling down at the job. Now I know that you don't question the guy when you cut off his finger; you question him the next day, taunting him with a bottle of pain killers.

Ginger, ouch!! I hope they gave you some good painkillers for that.

One of Dylan's classmates is having a pool party at the Y this afternoon, so we thought we'd aim for a quietish morning and early nap. Well, so much for that. He's bouncing off the fucking walls and at this rate will probably fall asleep about 5 minutes before we have to leave. Kill me now. (By which I mean "make me a martini.")

Ouch, indeed! I hope the drugs kick in soon.

Sounds quite accomplished there, Zenkitty.

My big projects for the day besides work work stuff are annoying but required before moving projects. Cleaning out the big major junk drawer(s) in the kitchen and cleaning out the medicine cabinet. All those parts and keys that have been in the drawer for years and all the expired for a decade or more medications are going to be history. Of course, I am the only one that can make those decisions.

I have to go to work at the office for half the day. Then we are going to In-Laws for fake early Seder, where my big project will be not to engage with my conservative, know-it-all bro-in-law if he starts talking about political subjects.

Zen, that was a ton. Kudos on the stealth tree saving.

Yesterday kicked my butt. Tired. Want to veg. but... Need to buy boxes. Pay rent. Give notice that I'm moving out. Do the pile of filing that will clean the bedroom, so that I can get down the road for packing. Moving sucks. Thankfully I've been pretty good at not junking this apt up in the 2 years that I've been here. This move should be a lot easier. But still a lot of work to do.

omnis, when do you leave?

Zen, making me oh, so tired. But I want pictures. Yard porn, mmmm.

Ginger, may the drugs do their job--a better one than they're apparently doing at the moment. Hindsight is wonderful, and can be a great motivator, says the wife of the guy who blew himself up helping a pile of green brush trimmings burn on a hot August afternoon by an injudicious application of gasoline. And a long enough wait to find the matches for the fumes to spread about 25 feet.