the world turns

This is a mildly silly and mildly crabby post brought on by a bottle of Edmond Fitzgerald porter out of Cleveland (that invoked the initial silliness) and too much sadness for one week - watching my teen go through his first ever loss of young people his age. Not nice. (That invoked the crabbiness that keeps sneaking back in.)

In  my best inner Steven Wright voice, this is what is going on.

- the gardening got done Sunday and Monday - including yours truly buying and using an electric hedge trimmer for the first time in more than 20 years. (I have always done trimming by hand clipper, and let me tell you, the power trimmer is really fast and powerfully good.) I am happy the flowers are in, the hedges are trimmed, and ta da, we even got the deck furniture scraped and re-painted. Dinner on the deck tonight was delightful.

-I discovered a new favorite dessert in the freezer section of the grocery store. Friendly's brand black raspberry ice cream cones - on a chocolate sugar cone, with a little blob of chocolate at the bottom of the inside of the cone like in a Nutty Buddy. Tres magnifique!

-we had our 26th anniversary this week. It floored me to think I have been married for more than half my life. I guess if I do the math this was technically the case last year too... but I didn't think of it then. So it didn't affect me.

-damn little invasive house sparrows have scared away both the house wrens and tree swallows from our bird houses, and now I have to remove any nests they might build as this was a requirement of my friend who built one of the birdhouses last year. I never thought I would say this about a bird species, but those little sparrows are idiots and I am not happy with them.

-I bought the cats brand new, cool, kitty collars. Orange for Mars and Green for Natalie. They are so handsome!

-I worked the grill at the h.s. concession stand last night for the first time. It was fun. Until cleanup time. (Usually I do the math, take the money and get things like water and popcorn, candy and nachos for people... the easy stuff.)

-I took a Facebook quiz today, after staying off Facebook for several days out of willpower, and learned that I am an "independent woman. " Because, you know, I just didn't know what kind of woman I was.

So there you have it. I am off to read a book. I am reading The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. Great read so far.