With work being so darned insane of late, I have really been looking forward to this three day weekend. For almost a month now, I have doing variations on the theme There, There, You Have A 3-Day Weekend Coming Soon.
Imagine my horror to find myself already getting ready to head into the office tomorrow. Wait, I’m not done having a long weekend yet!!
It feels to me as though I didn’t actually have three days off.
Probably because I took Boo Bug shopping on Saturday. Which sounds like such a simple thing to do, doesn’t it? BUT, the reason I took her shopping was because she claimed – and actually seemed to be – completely out of things to wear. And also her shoes were just…wow.
Now, you’d think that taking a kid shopping would mean, you know “get in the car and go shopping.” Hardly the sort of activity that eats a whole entire day of your life. One would think. But having learned a thing or two from past experience, before we got anywhere near the car I sat her down and started a list.
What do you already have, I asked her, pen poised.
Ummmmmmmmm……..
Ooooookay, how about this. How many pairs of jeans do you have?
Ummmmmmmmmmmm…
All right, let’s back up just a little. What would you like to have? What kind of styles are you going for, here?
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
Oh for carp’s sake...
Pretty quick, I realized it would simply be faster to have her get all her clothes so we could go through them. She did this in approximately eight seconds.
Uh-huh.
So I went in there and started pulling things out from under the bed, from the desk drawers, the hamper, between the mattress and the bed slats, etc. etc.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that the fastest route would be to simply pull everything out of that den of iniquity.
And then, of course, it’s in for a penny, in for a pound – so we ended up going through everything. There were toys in there from when she was six…and which haven’t seen the light of day since about that same time.
Then eventually, we actually went shopping. And there was buying of stuff. And carrying of stuff. And then suddenly my back went from “the usual irritating” to “Home. NOW.”
So we went home. And I spent the rest of the day alternating between complaining the heat packs in the summer time were evil and how much I was sweating right now, and griping about how it just didn’t seem to be doing anything and whining about my heat pack not being hot enough and demanding that the nearest Denizen take it downstairs and give it another zap in the microwave.
And that was what happened to Saturday.
Sunday, I woke up feeling like someone had been beating on me. I had plans to do some stuff in the garden, but instead I did sitting down stuff. Which was all good, because the sitting down stuff was important too – and I keep putting it off in favor of not-sitting-down stuff on the theory that I can do the sitting down stuff any old time, whereas most of the moving around stuff needs either daylight or a certain amount of rested-ness.
And that was Sunday.
But I’m really not sure what happened to today. Today went by in a blur, as if one minute I was just getting out of bed and the next minute I was saying to myself, Oh. I’d better go to bed, huh…have to get up early tomorrow to go wor-HEY! WAITASECOND, WHAT HAPPENED TO MY ‘LONG’ WEEKEND?!?!
And now I feel disgruntled because it honestly feels like not only a “normal” weekend, but a normal-short one. One with too many chores and not enough goofing off.
Meh.
But, I have to admit – it was a productive weekend, all things considered. The middle two kids now have a pretty clean, open room – with all the old junk out of there, it even seems a bit bigger. The gophers appear to have either given up, or gone deeper underground – no new mounds have appeared, and the only change I could find was what appeared to be an escape hatch on the far side of one of the beds.
Having already harvested the dried bean curtains in the bathroom, we are now on to growing some peas instead.
There are a few changes here. The peas are more vigorous climbers, so hopefully they’ll vine up further and more robustly. Also, these are new planters – they’re much deeper than the original ones, and have better drainage. And of course, these peas are meant to be harvested as they grow, rather than left on the vine to become dried peas – so the vines should keep growing for quite a while yet.
All of which the kittens really don’t care much about.
Peas? Eh, whatever. We prefer to pull all the leaves off of bell pepper plants and then drop them daintily into the bathtub, or perhaps poop in wide planters meant to be growing salads. Really like that last one. So don’t leave such a planter anywhere we can get to. By the way: We can jump almost as high as you are tall, sooooooo, good luck keeping it out of our reach. Mwahahahahaha.
Fleur Fatale (on the left here) recently discovered that she does not like Hot Tamale candies. This came as quite a shock to her, because she had been begging me for one for a long time before she finally got disgusted with my inability to follow simple instructions and simply snaked one for herself.
One chomp later, she was looking at me as if to say, You have GOT to be kidding me! I think…it just bit me BACK…!
Samantha Schilling, meanwhile, is starting to get some reddish brown spots in her coat. They’re hard to see from any distance, but she’s got an amazing combination of stripes and dots going; mostly she’s still like a grayscale copy of her sister, though. She is also proving to be the lovey-dove of the group. She loves to be pet (but not picked up, thank you all the same), and to curl up in or near laps. Or to have a sister get those awkward spots one has trouble grooming on one’s own.
(Yes. This is while the room purge was underway. The entire hallway was pretty much one very large pile of…well…crap.) (And yes, that chair has seen better days. It was my office chair until very recently – and I’d had it for approximately 27,000 years. I now have a newer one that has working wheels and is not wearing completely through on the seat. I feel VERY fancy right now.)
And with that, I need to get to bed, or I’m going to be in a world of hurt when my alarm goes off tomorrow. (Actually, I’m already going to be in a world of hurt. I have officially stayed up way too late for a work night. I need at least one more day of weekend here. Too bad the world doesn’t go according to my little needs, huh?!)
