Zombie Jesus Weekend

Carolyn went home this weekend to NJ to spend the holiday with her family. Seeing as how I don't really believe there is a giant man in the sky watching out for all of human kind who sent his son to die for our sins, I thought I'd spend the weekend at home, alone, doing absolutely nothing. Maybe sleeping, watching a ton of TV, that sort of thing. Indulging mostly in the sloth sin, I wager. With some gluttony thrown in for good measure.

Turns out, I didn't really do that much. Saturday I went to the driving range and hit a bucket of balls. I was pleasantly surprised at some of my drives. True, they still don't go very far, but I actually hit some nice shots with my three wood, the most horrible club I own. I hate it and never use it because I do so poorly with it. But surprisingly I got a few good shots with it. Then I went to lunch with Troy, played some video games with him and two other friends on Xbox Live, and did some online shopping for a ball marker/hat clip combo. (I found a Mustang one, which I bought.) Then I watched some TV, ate some Taco Bueno, and decided that I would try to fix my lawnmower.

Last year the self propel stopped working, and wouldn't you know, that dang lawnmower is really hard to push around without it. And because I'm a fat ass and don't enjoy exercise, it was probably harder than it should be. Anyway, I found out that a belt had slipped off of a pulley and I put it back together. My lawnmower is now working properly! Seeing as how I completed this task at 12:30am, I promptly went to bed.

Sunday morning I went golfing at 9:45am with Troy and Adam. I like golfing with them because they are only slightly better than me and I don't feel like I'm holding anyone up. Anyway, that was super fun. It was a really nice day after the sun came out and I got a bit sunburnt. I have a really awesome watch/glove line on my left hand.

We then ate at Five Guys, which was one of the only places we could find open on Easter. Turns out a lot of people take the whole thing pretty seriously. When we got there, we were starving, and there were three police cars in the parking lot. There seemed to be some sort of domestic dispute. I really wanted to know what was going on, but I never found out. It was nice to have a show with dinner though.

I came home and did a ton of laundry. Including all the sheets from the bed. Remy had a little anal leakage problem and stunk up the whole room with her stupid anal gland. I wish that she would give me some sort of warning so I could take her to the vet or something before this disgusting explosion happens in my house, but she doesn't. She just surprises me all the time with really unpleasant smells and then doesn't even bother to help clean it up. This happened Saturday night while I was sleeping. The smell was so bad it woke me up from dead slumber.

It's a good thing I really like that dog. Maybe they smell proportional to how much you love them. That's saying a lot, then.

I was going to mow the lawn, but it conveniently rained and I didn't have to.

Monday I went to work, came home, and mowed my front lawn for the first time in 2010. Who's excited that lawnmowing season had begun??? (I'm not. Although really early spring and really late fall are the times I actually enjoy it because I'm not dehydrating with every step.)

Before

After

Before

After

So, anyway, I guess the point here is that I was way more productive than originally planned. I'm I'm quite proud (Ah, another sin!) of my mechanical repair.



Side note: It POURED this morning. Like, only rain that Missouri can produce, rain. There was hail, just not here or at work. So, I get to work and I don't want to get out of the car because although I don't have far to go, I know I'll be SOAKED by the time I get to the door. So, I climb into the backseat of my car from the driver's seat, and found an umbrella in the back. I get out, open it up, and find that it had been booby-trapped. The thing fell apart into four pieces! I couldn't even figure out exactly what happened and threw the thing away. It wasn't an umbrella! It was just pieces!

So, that was pretty hilarious. If you are the person that booby-trapped my umbrella, KUDOS TO YOU. I'm sure the whole thing was pretty hilarious to anyone other than me.


That was pretty much my weekend. I will try to blog more better in the future...


End Blog.

1 Month Hiatus... Stinks

It's been a month since the bee sting incident and another three weeks since the broken back thing, so I decided it was about time I got out there to mow my grass one last time for the season (I have high hopes that this is the last time). I thought, what better time than to do it now while I have sore muscles from thinking I could speedwalk yesterday?

It went well. I have a nicely mowed lawn for the first time in almost 2 months.

Remy went outside to play in the yard after I was done. She was sprinting around like a maniac, as she is known to do. I was messing with her with my broom since it was out from sweeping off the back concrete porch of grass clippings and she was play attacking it. When she got bored of that, she wandered around the yard. She always inspects it after I am done cutting it so I didn't think anything of it... until she started rubbing her shoulders into the ground.

It was actually really funny because I thought maybe a feral neighborhood cat had peed on that spot and she was masking the scent with her own. But when she came back to the back door, it turned out she was rolling in shit and now had both shoulders and her collar all gross and smelly.

Thankfully, I knew what she had just done, so she didn't get to go inside, and I gave her a cold bath with the hose right there. It was really cold. She was not happy. Maybe she learned her lesson.

At least she didn't come in the house covered in shit and spread it all over things.

She's never done that before. This better not be a new thing to do, either. Because it was icky. Do you hear that, Remy? Icky.

I suppose it's my penance for having a nicely mowed lawn. It's a lot easier to find shit in it now.


End Blog.

Escape from Certain Death

It was really nice out yesterday when I got home from work. Kinda cool, but not cold, and sunny. I thought that it was prefect weather to cut my lawn and hoped that it might be the last time this season. The grass was kinda high and ugly and had gone to seed, and as I was mowing, like 5 other people in the neighborhood had the same idea.

I finished the front yard and was hoping that I had enough gas to finish the back, but only a few passes into the backyard and the mower died. So, I went to the gas station and got some more, came back, and continued mowing.

When I had about 1/3 of the back yard yet to finish, I was trying to get this really big weed along the fence out of the ground, and I felt this sharp pain on my right hip. I thought maybe something small shot out of the mower and hit me, even though it would have been a ridiculous angle to do so. Then I felt another sharp pain on my left ankle. My next thought was that there was some sort of thorn or something that I had picked up while trying to tame the jungle along my side fence. I looked at my ankle and didn't see anything hostile.

My hip was still hurting though, so I looked at it again and rubbed it. As I did, I saw a yellowjacket, pulled my hand back, and let's not sugar coat it... I panicked. I know that yellowjackets are evil, so I was scared. The devil's minion was out to get me. I know this because yellowjackets 1) are evil, 2) can sting more than once, 3) release pheromones calling their buddies to attack you as well, and 4) I wasn't sure if I was allergic to them or not. I've only been stung one other time by a giant wasp in high school, and I know that sometimes you don't develop allergies until after you've been stung.

This picture is so creepy!

So, I felt that panicking was an appropriate reaction. All of those things ran through my mind in a split second and I knew I had to get out of there or face the wrath of 9 million other angry yellowjackets.

So, because I'm smart, I had left the back door locked, and therefore had to sprint all the way around my house to the front door. I was flailing my arms and hoping that the yellowjacket I saw was not tangled up in the shirt I was wearing, and 9 million other yellowjackets were not following me. (I've seen My Girl, I know how this could end.) I got inside and headed to the bathroom to assess the damage. I'd been stung through my clothing.

I looked at my hip and ankle and saw them starting to swell around the sting sites. I was on my way to get some ice when I realized that I had spots on my inner thighs that were also very painful. Was I stung more than twice outside? Did I just get stung again?

You thought I panicked before!

The first thought I had was, "There's a yellowjacket inside my shorts!" I immediately ripped them from my body, along with my underwear (because who the hell knows where the yellowjacket is!) and threw them across the floor. Remy was excited by my actions and I said to her, "I'm so scared of my pants!" It was kind of pathetic, but in retrospect funny, so I thought I would share.

I ran into my room and put new underwear on, because I didn't want to run around my house with bee stings AND no underwear. It's one or the other - not both. You just can't do both. Plus, if I was about to go to the hospital because of anaphylactic shock, at least they would be clean.

Then, avoiding my pants of death which likely contained a living yellowjacket, I got some ice and tended to the swelling. In all, I managed to get five - count them, FIVE - bee stings. Luckily about this time, Carolyn called me, and foregoing whatever it was that she wanted to talk about, I asked her to be the best person in the world and go buy and bring me Benadryl so that I wouldn't die. She kindly obliged. I suppose that's bad timing on her part, eh? "Oh, and, while you're out doing that, could you pick up a gallon of milk for me?" (I was planning on going out for one later, but I knew this had pretty much done me in for the night.)

She also bought me a box of cereal to go with my milk, which I didn't ask for. It was kind of her, except for the fact that she obviously just did it to MOCK me. The cereal she bought was Honey Nut Cheerios.


She bought me BEE cereal! I could have been dying while waiting on her Benadryl delivery!

She claims that it was unintentional, which is sad because it's probably the most hilarious thing anyone has ever done to me. So, I had cereal for dinner, which was nice because I didn't have to cook or worry about what to eat at all. And... really... hil-aaaa-rious!

Meanwhile, I'm still afraid of my pants of death and to finish mowing the last of my yard.

It didn't help that Belinda told me a story about her dogs being attacked by yellowjackets who had an underground nest in her old yard.

Even covering everything and then mowing isn't a good idea because it stung me through my clothes! Or, quite possibly was somehow inside them. I'm still not sure how it happened.

The Benadryl knocked me out though (I took only one) and I slept from 8:30pm to 7:00am. And even though it was ten and a half hours of sleep, it was drug induced and I didn't really feel that well rested this morning.

The added bonus is that the stings still hurt a wee bit and now have become super itchy.

Bee venom, I hate you... Yellowjackets, I hate you more. I always thought people that ran away from them were crazy, that if you didn't bother them, they wouldn't hurt you. I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to turn into one of "those" people after this.

Five times!!


End Blog.

Climate Control

I was planning on mowing my lawn today. I woke up slightly before 9am, went outside and melted. Therefore, my lawn is still a jungle. Somehow my neighbor managed to mow his lawn without spontaneously combusting, so now I look like the white trash on the block, but I don't really care. It feels like it's a billion degrees outside.


I bet you didn't believe me... but that's totally from the weather channel...

Anyway, I had a great day of napping indoors while trying to recover from that melting bit of the day. I had a chocolate malt. It helped a lot.


End Blog.

Race Loser

I haven't mowed my lawn in two weeks, so I knew going in it was going to take me well over 47 minutes to mow the darn thing. More like two and a half hours... complete with screaming at the mower, two phone calls (one interruption and one simply to rant and complain... or whine would probably be the better description), and many a stall when I had to pull clumps of grass out of the blades.

Two and a half hours. But my lawn is short again and I don't look trashy compared to the neighbors. In fact, one of my neighbors has only cut his grass once all year. My house looks so awesome next to his, even with my lack of landscaping. Someday I'd really like to have a landscaped area around my house... but I'm sure that requires a lot of money I don't have right now, and a lot of hard work outside.

The high today was 85 degrees. I'm sure it wasn't quite that hot when I was actually mowing, but it was sure humid and I was really sweaty and disgusting when I was done. And since I was mowing for eons, I have fun blisters on the inside of my thumbs from holding the bar handle thingies down in conjunction with the vibration of the motor.

So... in order to beat the 47 minute mowing record, I must not wait so long between cuttings. One week, max. Too bad there's not someone here to hold me to that rule...


End Blog.

Lawn Mower Races... With Myself

I'm entering a competition with myself for the fastest lawn mowing time possible. I didn't time it the first two times I did it, but I already know that tonight was the fastest I've ever done it. I'm getting better at it. At any rate, the time to beat is 47 minutes. I shall try to do better than that next time.

This was the first time that I didn't have to put gas in it at all though, so that saved time right there. And now that I know where the trouble spots are, and am getting a good feel for what direction to go in, I think I'm taking less time out there and still doing a good job.

I was hoping to be done in under an hour, so I'm happy. I'm probably a super big nerd for telling you this. =) But, really, cutting the lawn is quite the science.


End Blog.

I'll Probably Hate This Once it's Summer

I suppose the biggest headache about owning a home is the maintenance and upkeep. But you know what I learned today? I'd rather mow the lawn than vacuum. Or do laundry or clean in any manner. (Unless maybe it was my car...) A clean house or clothes do not give me nearly enough sense of accomplishment as short grass does. And fresh cut grass smells nicer than any cleaning supplies you can give me.

So, as you may have guessed, I bought a used lawnmower from my friend today. My grass really needed cutting. (I think the front yard may have been worse.)


I had a few different kind of flowers in my yard, mostly purple... so I kinda felt a little bad about cutting the lawn because the color was sort of pretty, since I have no other flowers growing at my house. (I had a dream last night that I went to Lowe's and bought a whole bunch of flowers and landscaped the front of my house.)


One of them looked like it was in the mint family, with its square stem... but I have no idea what kind of flowers they were. Minty ones.


And I also had weeds hanging out with them... So, I mowed them all down.


I got the lawnmower out of my car by Blackwell ingenuity. I had help getting it into my car and realized that it would be too heavy for me to lift out of there alone. So I stacked up some different sized moving boxes still laying around in my garage, and I sort of eased it down stepwise out of the back of the SUV. Come to think of it, it might not be Blackwell ingenuity, but rather the fact that I've been playing a lot of Lego Star Wars...


Either way, I got it out of the car and had no problem starting it up. I got to cutting the grass and stalled the engine several times on high, thick portions of grass. The good news is that I didn't dislocate my shoulder trying to pull the mower start cord thing. I got about... four passes through the back lawn (I started in back so it looked like I knew what I was doing by the time I made it to the front yard where people could see me) when I ran out of gas.

I was really smart and went out to pick up the mower without my gas can. So I couldn't fill it up before I came home so that I had some ready for the mower. I thought I'd start and see how far I got before I had to put gas in the thing. Turns out, not too long.


This is what the grass looked like when I went to get gas.

I got gas, came home, and finished the job. It took a while, I stalled it quite a few times, and I missed a couple spots that I had to go back over. Then I tackled the front yard and my neighbors with the loud bass in their pickup stood at their front door and watched me. Which kinda weirded me out a bit. But it was the old lady that lives over there and then the, like, 1 year old. Sometimes I wonder how many people live in that house. It's at least a three generation family.

Anyway, when I was done, I felt pretty good about it, regardless of the staring. Also, as probably anyone with a lawn feels after cutting the grass, my lawn is bigger than I thought. Here is Remy outside, making sure it was still her yard, and grumbling something about everything smelling different.


But it looked much better after I was done. And I was in good company, I heard four other people mowing their lawns today too. And there is a weed whacker going outside right now. However, there is one downfall to cutting the lawn.


I think these have just become my lawn shoes... and I have to go buy new sneakers. Which, I've had these for over two years so I probably need a new pair of sneakers, but I hadn't really planned on buying them. Until now.

So, there's my Sunday. Now I have to do something less rewarding - laundry.

Don't you dare post a comment about how I missed a spot, or you shall become fertilizer.


End Blog.