Big adventures

Bob's alarm went off at 6:30 so he could get up and get dressed and get out to Lawrence for a 9:15 tee time; we both went to bed at about 10:30 last night, and while I could probably have forced myself to go back to sleep, I decided to go ahead and get up.

I started some laundry, and put a corned beef brisket in the crockpot for dinner tonight--that's our traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner, but I thought I'd do it tonight since if I did it tomorrow night, we probably wouldn't get to eat until around 9:00. I boil new potatoes and cook cabbage--Bob could boil the potatoes, certainly, but the cabbage is one of my specialties. I have so few, I like to hang on to them.

Then I went outside and started cleaning up the back yard--cutting off the dead plants and picking up leaves. It's always a nice Spring surprise to pick up a handful of leaves and find new plants coming up underneath them, mostly herbs like peppermint, and other things I can't think of at the moment. I've been neglecting the garden the last couple of years. The year before last was the summer I was going through the breast cancer scare, and the summer that we had the soil trucked in to build up the yard, and sod laid.

And I was just starting the new job, so there was a lot of stress all around. Probably working in the garden would have helped, but it doesn't seem to work that way, usually.

Then last year, I don't know what happened. I could blame it on the weather, and that's probably fair--it was very dry last year, and very hot very early, and I got tired of trying to keep everything watered, and worried about the water bill, and I mostly just let the yard go.

This year I'm going to try very hard not to do that. We're going to have to plant grass seed soon--most of the sod died through a combination (probably) of not enough water, and way too much shade. Bob's friend John came over with his chainsaw a few weeks ago and he and Bob trimmed some of the branches from the trees close to the house, so hopefully we'll get a little more sun back there, and maybe we can get grass to grow again. It's discouraging, and that's one of the reasons I was so uninvolved in the yard last summer--it made me unhappy to go back there and have it look so unattractive.

Pyewacket kept crying at me from inside the house, so I came in, put her leash on her, and took her out.

She talks a big game, but once she was outside, she was very cautious. Sniffing everything, staying low to the ground, watching.

She was getting more comfortable, and thus bold, and started over toward the neighbor's yard, but then she heard a noise--somebody opening a garage door or something--and she bolted for the house.

Dinah wanted to hear all about it.

"You smell different! Where have you been??"