Two-thousand pounds of dirt and other fun things

The blog has become mostly a once-a-week thing now that the second-largest newspaper publishing company owns the paper. I had to sign my life away last week, along with any children born after the Cutlet, just so I could have an e-mail address that I didn't want. What that means is I'm bound to limit my personal Internet time at work, and that time can now be monitored. I'm sure if I said what I thought about the whole ordeal that black helicopters would swoop down out of the air and fire me on the spot. There have been too many casualties of the At-Work Blog War for me to enlist. My principles stop short of putting my family's health and welfare at risk. So, no more hammering out a quickie before getting down to business, and that leaves Thursday (a blissful day off with the Cutlet) as the prime day for me to update.

It cracks me up when somebody tells me there's nothing going on in their lives. What? What planet do you live on, and is there room for one more? There is always something going on here. Sure, a lot of it may seem mundane, but we don't sit around to let life pass us by for long. I could use a vacation from it now and then, but mostly it's good. Makes the time fly too fast, really.

Sunday afternoon I single-handedly loaded up 2,000 pounds of dirt into our pickup for our backyard flowerbeds. I told myself that the next time we need such a pile of dirt, that it was going to be delivered via dumptruck and not transported as 50 40-pound bags by me. Next up is a long list of projects that I'm supposed to get done by mid-December so that when family comes to visit for the Cutlet's Dec. 26 birthday the house will resemble a semblance of order. As in loading the dirt, I tell myself that the next house we buy will either be relatively new (as opposed to 40 years old), completely renovated before we darken its doorway or come with a free handyman who lives in the attic and only appears when something breaks.

My birthday was a few weeks ago, but scheduling has prevented us from having the obligatory get-together with my parents. We're going over there in another week and my dad told us to bring the pickup truck because he has some stuff with which to clutter our abode. That really scares me, and I'm tempted to take a random load of junk over there when we go just to even things up. Maybe my lifelong dream of owning a giraffe is about to come true. One can only hope.

Until we meet again, precious blog readers, keep it real– really good if at all possible. As the French say, "See ya!"