Happiness...

over.

Yesterday, I cleaned out the tomato plant branches that were hanging in the Koi pond. I tossed them on the yard so that I could run over them with the mulching blade on the mower. I was planning to mow later in the afternoon.

After lunch, The Mrs. came out and pulled out the rest of the tomato plants. She made a big pile of tomato plants on the walk right in front of the front steps. Then she said to me, "I don't know what to do with these plants." I said, "I tossed some on the lawn to see if the mulcher would take care of them. Do you want to see if it works?" She said yes, so I asked if she had her keys. She looked puzzled. So I said, "OK, you can use my key," and I put the key into the lawn tractor.

Her eyes lit up, and she said, "You mean, you want me to drive the tractor?"

But of course, since you've been whining for weeks about how you're the only woman on the street who doesn't know how to run the family lawn tractor. (In actuality, I've only seen three of the six visible neighbor women driving their tractors. But two of those three are the two The Mrs. talks to.)

I ran her through all the controls, including the "Democrat switch". Then she was off.


I'm not really sure, but it seemed like she was having a good time.


For my part, I had to stand at the tomato pile and toss plant branches out after each pass of the mower. Tomato plants are close to 100% water, so they simply disappear when you run them through a mulching blade. Except for a couple of the larger stalks. After a while of standing there lobbing tomato plants in front of the mower, I got a little bored and started lobbing little green tomatoes at The Mrs. This stopped when I got a Real Dirty Look (tm) after bouncing one right off the top of her head.

Don't get all huffy at me. You would have done the same thing.

It looks like JohnnyB had a similar experience, only being a Democrat (or perhaps a Bolshevik - who can tell the difference these days), he id two things differently. First, he did not use any power tools as, covered here, Democrats are fearful of power tools. Second, he just tied the stuff off for the government to deal with. Go hit some ads on his site - he needs the money for his impending move back to Canada. Or Minnesota. Not that there's much difference.

Here's a picture of my handiwork hanging the tire swing. It's a genuine, used Goodyear racing slick. The installation went very smoothly, though I almost messed up and drilled from the top down through the beam as opposed to from the bottom up. A subtle difference, but when you're drilling with a hand drill and a spade bit through 5" of wood, the changes of a slightly off-angle hole are pretty high, so if you start at the far side from where the metal plate is, you run a pretty big risk of not lining up with the holes in the plate by the time you get all the way through.


I call these next two shots, "You Dirty Bastards."



It's not as bad as it first looked, now that I've washed the mud off.

Here are three photos of HannieC's courtship of the neighbor's cat. Sometimes it likes to play, sometimes not. Yesterday was a not. It wanted to be near HannieC, but not too near.