Day: April 7, 2007

Today did not go as I intended. I planned to work hard all morning. Then in the afternoon and evening I was going to hang out with Janci. There was going to be laughter and lots of talking. I didn’t get as much done in the morning as I planned. The time with Janci started really well. We talked over her latest novel and events in her lives and mine. She wandered through my house with me and listened to me babble about all my plans for painting and replacing baseboards. Then we left the house in quest of some fabric for a birthday project for Kiki. We went to three different fabric stores. None of them had what we were looking for. By the end of that I was flagging. My head had begun to ache and all I really wanted was to curl into a ball somewhere and have some down time. Janci said she was tired too, so I dropped her at her apartment. I went in with her for awhile and that was a good thing because we realized that she already has some fabric that will work for the planned project. Also she gave me her old outdated laptop computer. It can’t connect to the internet and it has only a floppy drive. I doesn’t even have a working battery, it has to be plugged in. It does have a working USB port though. This means about all that it is good for is word processing. This means I can type things while sitting upstairs in the sunshine and then use a memory stick to transfer them to my real computer in the basement. There have been many many times that I wanted to work on a story or revision, but I didn’t want to sit in the basement to do it. Someday I’ll have a real laptop, but until then this may make things a little easier.

After leaving Janci’s I bought dinner for the kids and crashed into bed with a book. I finally crawled back out again about 20 minutes ago. I didn’t get everything done today. The house is far from clean. I’m headachy and tired and grouchy. I think I’ve got a sinus infection. When I look sanely at how much stuff I’ve accomplished in the last three days I’ve done plenty. But I’m still mad at myself for not getting more done today. And if I wasn’t going to get stuff done, couldn’t I have enjoyed having a break?

A few days ago Kiki asked if she could mow the lawn rather than having to do Saturday house cleaning chores. I’ve not been looking forward to solving the problem of lawn mowing. I hadn’t yet decided whether to hire a neighborhood boy or just buy a new mower and do it myself. Giving the job to Kiki is a possibility that I’d considered, but I really didn’t want to have to fight over lawn mowing. So when she volunteered to give it a try I figured it would be a good experiment. I want to see if she’ll still be as excited about mowing the lawn after she has actually done it once.

Since we currently do not own a mower I borrowed one from my backyard neighbor. We put gas in it and Kiki got started on the front yard. In order for Kiki to mow the back yard, there was a considerable amount of picking up to be done. One of the items that needed picking up was our saucer shaped snow sled. Apparently it had been acting as a little greenhouse for the last couple of weeks because underneath it was a circle of tall green grass. The kids were all amazed at this beautiful tall grass. Gleek in particular fell in love with this little patch of summer. She was extremely dismayed to learn that we intended to mow it. We then had our own little environmental protest in the back yard. It came complete with a civil disobedience sit in. Gleek plunked herself in the middle of the patch of grass and refused to move. She got the neighbor kids to come and sit with her. The only thing they didn’t have was signs and chanting although I’m sure they would have done that too if they had thought of it.

I had yet to decide what to do about the demonstration when Kiki needed help with a different section of grass that was especially long and weedy. I pushed the mower over the weeds and CRUNCH! The mower hit a large rock. That was the end of the mowing because the rock bent the mower blade so badly that it put an end to all mowing until the blade can be replaced. I had to go confess to my neighbor that I’d broken his mower. He was really nice about it and I’ve offered to pay for the replacement blade.

So the yard remains only partially mowed. With the threat of mowing no longer imminent the protesters have scattered to other activities. What they don’t realize is that later today the blade will be replaced and the little green patch will be mowed. Hopefully by Kiki, although the interruption has dampened her lawn mowing enthusiasm. Within a month the whole yard will be that green, so I doubt the protesters will miss the green patch much.