Today is the first day of post-summer school summer vacation, so I just sat down from 3-4 hours of watering and gardening. My knees hurt. The sign of a good time having been had, you know, when you're sore all over and you've gotten something done. Trimmed a bunch of plants, transplanted some tiny seedlings, pulled a bunch of weeds. Watered a lot.
I seem to have some species of Africanized dandelion growing everywhere this year. They grow about three feet a second. You can blind them with a shot from a Baring pistol and then finish them off with a machete if you know what you're doing. The roots can crack a foundation. Anyway.
Time for a glass of water and to see what time I can waste on the computer. No appointments or deadlines today.
The kids asked for pancakes so I made some pancakes. Out of buttermilk. The buttermilk recipe tastes better. I asked them what they wanted to do today and they said in unison "Nothing!" They're Great Indoorsmen of the first order.
Set the thermostat higher again. The air conditioning came on at 75 and then again at 78... it seems comfortable in here, don't need the air on.
Gardened and watered. Cleaned up a bit.
The Salvation Army will collect the old ugly couch tomorrow. I'll be glad to see it go. Ordered a small couch for Cassidy's room from Ikea, no idea when that will be delivered.
Ate a turkey sandwich with a sliced tomato from the garden and a sliced red onion. How delicious.
Looking at a Canon camera on amazon.com yet again. I like my little pocket camera, but it would be nice to have a "real" camera again. Although I sure took a lot of BAD photos with the "real" film camera I bought for the Maui trip. I've never taken so many bad photos in my life. I ended up with one good picture of Bob. That's a LOT of bad pictures. The Fuji Film underwater cameras were fun and I had better luck with them. That would have been a fun trip if Diane had stayed home.
Tempted by the Canon camera. I wonder if it's realistic to expect Diane to repay the rent I paid for her? I'd rather have bought the camera instead of paying her rent.
Bank the money. For the kid's education, for future expenses. Take care of the kids. I certainly wish that I'd invested more than I did in Apple stock back when. Diane invested in Lucent. Mine was a better choice.
I have a list of publicly-traded firms in the death industry. Boomers will begin to croak sooner or later and need death industry services. I don't see how it can miss. If they don't want to be planted, they'll want to be burned to ashes. There's money to be made disposing of the corpses of baby boomers, they'll be dying off in recording numbers. Get in front of that. So INVEST in those companies NOW!!!! Get around to it.
The camera is still very tempting, photos are the only thing I'm keeping as I weed out all of my possessions. And kitchen tools. I need to edit my photos I've taken. I ordered a couple of hard drives to back my data up to. Send one to Mom to keep and one to Kelly and Bob or Toni and Scott to keep offsite, just in case. Make incremental backups of new photos and music. Try not to acquire or save anything else. Buying the hard drives seemed economical and more practical than backing up to DVDs. Back it all up. Go through that folder of clutter I have. Drawings can go in iPhoto. So I'll have iPhoto data and iTunes data. And that's about all. My web pages (such as they are) are a convenient place to stick things, like this blog. Better than having dozens of little text files scattered throughout my backup disks. All of which are in the garage, btw, waiting for the hard drives to arrive and be filled. Goodbye, backup disks.
Looking at a wardrobe to keep my stuff in instead of the closet, which is crowded. Might get around to that. Order that from Ikea and wait for them to deliver it. The Prius isn't up to the job, and I don't want to rent a truck to pick furniture up.
I'd also like to get some lumber delivered from Dixieline and build another planter or two. Very pleased with the planter that's there now. Looks great to see bright flowers right outside the laundry room door.
I'm thinking about clearing out the front garden area by the black gate and planting marigold seeds there. They seem to grow without any problems. I'd also ordered three "Bee Balm" plants from Burpee which ought to arrive eventually. I had those in mind for that area, near the fence.
The lawn could stand to be mowed, but I don't want to cut it too short again in the heat. I really like the lawn. I even like the giant monster crabgrass I find growing in the lawn.
What else is new? Not much. Sift through the remaining, final stuff in the tool chest. Scan in photos that I don't have in digital format. Scan in photos and negatives. Get rid of clutter one piece at a time until it's all gone at last.
