Once the daffodils and the tulips finish blooming, the Ellipse garden is a pretty dull place.
Usually, I plant annuals for color, but the plants that I plant and the plants that come up can be two different things. My marigolds were a bust, so I tried calendula and, well, it’s a good thing it’s a good looking flower, because it self-seeds, and I can’t get rid of it, and it crowds out out everything but the weeds.
But I got tired of looking at calendula, so last year, I planted a few cleome, and they did pretty good. Yesterday, I weeded the garden and, once the big weeds were gone, what was left was thousands of cleome volunteers.
I think the calendula has met its match.
My shoes were worn out, so I bought new ones. Woohoo!
I wore my new shoes around the house, and they hurt my pinkie toe. I chalked it up to ‘new shoes,’ and I figured they just needed to get used to my feet, so to speak. So after my toe stopped hurting, I wore them again, and Ouch! My toe knuckle was dragging on my shoe! This is my 5th pair of these exact same shoes, so either my feet have changed, or my shoes have. Either way, I need shoes, so I marked the sore spot with a Sharpie, googled “cobblers near me,” and it said to drive an hour north or an hour south.
I went north, and I’ll get them back in a week.
We bought a sink for the new bathroom.
In fact, we bought the biggest sink we could find, because sometimes the dirt on my hands doesn’t stop at my wrists and, when you want to wash youreelbows, a big sink is the way to go.
Mary wants a soapstone top because soapstone is as Vermonty as maple syrup. (At least it was until Vermont ran out of it – now it comes from Brazil.)
So we ordered the slab, and I owed the stone guys the template for the sink.
Simple. Should be in the box, right? It was, of course, nowhere to be found, so I googled it, printed the pdf, and gave it to the soapstone people.
They didn’t like it. They don’t do CNC, and they wanted a full-sized paper template they could cut with an X-acto knife and trace with a pencil. Cave men.
Fine. No problem. I took my PDF to the print shop down the street, but they said they couldn’t print it out full-sized.
Fine! Just fine! So I took my PDF to the print shop down the street from the cobbler’s shop where I left my shoes, and I printed off 2 full-size copies.
I know it’s unlike me to be careful, but I decided to check the paper template against the ceramic sink and, sure enough, it was way wrong.
Fine. Just fucking fine. I put the sink on a piece of butcher paper, marked it with a sharpie and an x-acto knife, penciled a cover letter on a piece of binder paper, snail mailed it to Perkinsville, VT, and retreated to my man cave.
We got motorcycle trouble!
The Suzuki smokes. Needs new exhaust gaskets.
The Kawasaki has a flat tire, needs a tweak to carburetor #2, and sometimes, the blinker doesn’t blink. I fixed all that. No problem.
Today, I took a trip to the post office, and the KZ kept wanting to die every time I clutched. I got 3/4 of the way through a round trip through town before I realized that the choke was still on.
Duh. Even Mary thought that was dumb.
Mary likes a tidy lawn and she takes good care of it.
With another hand surgery coming up, she agonized over whether to mow the lawn today or wait till her hand is better. I told her that, hey, the tractor’s got a necker’s knob, so she ought to be able to mow one-handed. She said yeah, but, you know, she’s a lefty, and the knob is on the wrong side of the steering wheel. So I offered to move the necker’s knob to the other side, and she brightened right up.
I had to laugh.
Suri graduated from 8th grade last week, and we went to the procession, and I was thinking to myself …
When I graduated from 8th grade, we had a rehearsal the day before the ceremony, and the entire class went through the motions of walking, standing and sitting on cue. Any questions, they asked? Well, I was a boy scout, and I’d noticed that the Flag should have been on the other side of the room, and I pointed it out loudly to the entire faculty and graduating class in the room.
“Okay well um Thanks, Reid. I guess. Why don’t you, uh, take care of that for us?” they said. Then they herded us all back to classes, and I forgot to follow up.
When the big night came, all the kids and their families filled the auditorium, and the emcee asked the crowd to join him in the pledge of allegiance, and the entire crowd turned, as one, to where the flag should have been. And when it wasn’t there, a confused murmur filled the room as hundreds of people looked for the flag, found it, and shuffled to face it. I nearly died.
The graduate
I had a pedicure today.
All the females in the family keep telling me pedicures are the way to go, and I keep telling them I don’t get it.
So for my birthday, they got me a pedicure. Deluxe.
They sat me on a massage chair and soaked my feet. They scrubbed my skin. Exfoliated me. Trimmed my nails. Cleaned my cuticles. Moisturized my skin, culled my calluses, massaged my ankles, steamed me with hot towels, and encased each foot in a bag full of hot wax. Then she gave me a 5-ply, bright blue toenail color job. They musta’ gone through half a dozen towels!
It seemed a little excessive, if you ask me, but it was not unpleasant.