After a couple of days delay due to rain and my general laziness we’ve finally wrapped up the Great Yard Upheaval of 2005. Mary and I stripped off the top layer of grass a couple days ago and finished turning over the soil this morning. We spread fetilizer and some fancy looking grass seed, raked it under, hosed it down and vowed never to do this again (or at least I did as I battered our poor, nonfunctioning sprinkler against the sidewalk).

I saw a robin repeatedly swooping down on a squirel this morning while we were working. It squawked angrily a few times and chased the squirel as a ran along our fence. Bizarre.

Dear $1.93 gas moron,

At what point in your life did you decide that saving a few pennies on gas was worth spending fifteen minutes sitting in your car in a line waiting for gas? I hope you enjoyed the fumes.

Sincerely,

Guy driving past on the way to the woods with his dogs

I guess this mentality is something I will never quite understand. The price of gas dropped under $2 a gallon for the first time in a long while in the past twenty four hours and people go crazy. Cars were lined up three or four deep at the gas station I drove by on my way to take the dogs for a run this morning. I suppose if I drove a mini tank to work every day instead of my dumpy little 323 I might get a little more excited about adding up all these incremental savings over the course of a year. Personally, I’m a big fan of late-night gas ups and this or this.

I’ve finally been getting around to updating this site a little. Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1, made an address bar icon, made a static page for colophon (which maybe in another couple months I’ll actually update), created a Flickr account for picture hosting, added search feature to the menu column, added a previous/next page link to the bottom of the blog page, and I guess that’s about it for now. I’ve been toying around with a few completely unnecessary additions such as drop-down menus and recently played iTunes, but for now I’m content to keep things as simple as possible.

I’ll dub it The Great Yard Upheaval of 2005. Our previously hideous backyard has had its hideousness multiplied many times over by today’s back-breaking efforts. Using the stump of a splintered shovel and a garden rake Mary and I began the process of overturning the tangle of dead grass currently gracing our soil. This was made especially interesting by the prolific network of mulberry and white pine tree roots hovering just beneath the surface. Five hours of root pulling (using the ever-powerful lower back muscles as any true twenty-something male would) and dirt stabbing and we seem to have made a depressingly small dent in the project.

In the picture on the left I’m kicking some mulberry root tail. Note the back curvature. You can almost see my spine rupturing through the skin. The picture on the right should give you a better overview of our progress. The dogs seemed to enjoy a day in dirt. Taylor chipped in with a couple nice size holes of her own, while Trammell leaped in to help me pull most of the roots we exposed. Good kids.

It’s been a weird 24 hours. I felt myself getting sick yesterday morning. One of those feelings where your entire body starts to ache and your stomach and head just feel like they’re slowly shrinking in on themselves. I went to Boston’s for dinner with my mom and my brother in the evening and literally couldn’t put away more than a single bite of pizza. Came home and crashed immediately. Fell asleep at about 7:15 pm and got up this morning at about 9:45 am. It wasn’t uninterupted sleep though since Trammell’s been sick too. I was up with him for half-hour blocks a couple times so he could go eat grass and throw up outside. The sleep helped though. I got my appetite back somewhere in the night and gobbled down leftover pizza whenever I let the dogs out. This morning (after eating still more pizza for breakfast) things came full circle when I had one of those peaceful “everything’s right with the world” moments. I was sitting at my computer listening to Tranconfiguration off of Seven Swans when Taylor came in the room and sat next to me. Trammell folllowed her in and spent the next minute licking Taylor’s ear while she cocked her head and stared up at me. I guess it’s hard to explain. Although I suppose it’s tough not to have a peaceful, enlightened moment while listening to that song.