Hey all!
I don't know about all of you, but as the weather gets warmer, it seems as if my weekends fill up faster than the food-waste bin . . . ok, bad analogy . . . but they seem to fill up super fast.
Last weekend, I helped both my girls buy new cars -- Totally unplanned, mind you -- but they did it all themselves, I was there for moral support and to make sure they didn't get swindled. Both experiences, to my utter surprise, were easy and ended up great for both of them. Now my youngest has her dream car, a Mini Cooper, and my oldest has a more reliable car than the piece of s__t that we got her to get through school -- but that is another story for another time . . . suffice it to say, both girls are super happy.
This memorial day weekend, we spent our time mucking out the backyard. Now that doesn't sound like it would take much more than a day, but let me put this into perspective. I have demon grass that grows back there . . . in two weeks, between the grass, weeds, brambles and crud that seems to accumulate, we had the setting for a low budget horror flick back there. All we needed was some rusted wrought iron, and we'd be golden.
Seriously.
But I put on my big boy clothes and did the deed that needed to be did. And found a previously unknown bumblebee nest that made its presence finally known by a loud humming that made me look all around until I spotted where the bumbles were bumbling from. Needless to say, I did the whole man-scream and jumped back from where a bumble lazily floated up to see what was disturbing them, making my wife ask "So what did you do?" I avoided that part of the yard the remainder of the day.
We did get the backyard cleaned up, mostly. There's still work to be done, but that's to be expected after a wet spring. I did accomplish one other thing, and that was blowing up our pressure washer. Yes, the cheap thing finally burnt out. I was only, you know, USING it as it was intended to be used. I had finished the deck, the yard furniture and was then working on the cement pad when it started making a very odd noise. The pressure stopped and it kept grumbling along, sounding much like the bumblebee nest. I gave it a glance to see smoke pouring out from the vents in the side. A quick leap to the extension cord to unplug it and off it went to the heap of things that are labeled as "to the dump". I seem to have a knack of doing that to pressure washers for some reason.
In writerly news, I've finally finished the second draft of the Misplaced Mentor. All I need to do now is go through it once more -- looking for typos I missed, my crutch words, and things that just don't seem to make sense, and then it's off to my editors. I'm glad to have this one closer to being done. I've been working on the outline for the next installment, so I have to finish one before I can start the other . . . you know how it is . . . don't want to have too many things going at once or nothing gets done.
That's all for now -- I'm sure I'll have more misadventures to talk about next time . . . :P
Terry