simply saturday

I don't know if it is just me and our network or it's blogger or what but every time I've visited a blogspot page today, I've had to refresh the page 3 or 4 times to view it. It's very odd and more than a little annoying

I'm having a lazy Saturday (sort of) but am exhausted all the same. Last night, about an hour after fell asleep, I woke up with a wicked charley horse in my right leg. It was so painful that I had to get up and stretch and stretch and stretch before I could comfortably lie down again. Ordinarily, I have a really high threshold for pain but something about your muscle feeling like it's in a vice grip always gets to me. After the walking around and stretching was over, I fell back to sleep, hard. So hard that when I woke up this morning, I felt as if I'd been drugged. My leg was still stiff and sore this morning. It was a really odd feeling. I actually felt groggy for a couple of hours this morning.

Our handy person, Pat, was here this morning. Mark hired him to come in for a few hours today so they could do a bunch of wiring upstairs. We've been wanting to put lights in our closets for some time now and we wanted a couple of extra circuits in our computer room but it involves crawling around in our attic and neither Mark, nor I are keen to do it. Enter Pat. While the two of them were upstairs working on the wiring, I figured I'd tackle the garden. It's a mess. The lawn has needed to be cut for a week now and I noticed last night that the weeds have completely taken over the flower bed at the side of the house.

After my shower, I completely covered myself with this spf 30 kiddy waterproof sunscreen that I had and, before breakfast, decided to start working on the back flower beds because "how bad can they be?" Well, as it happens, they can be pretty terrible. Ugly actually. Full of enthusiasm and covered with sunscreen, I pulled my little wheel barrow and bucket of gardening tools out of the shed and set off to de-weed the patio and the four tiny flower beds that surround it. About 30 minutes into the project, I was melting. It was totally fucking hot at 8 a.m. this morning. I could not believe it. Up until today, it's been just lovely outside, breezy, coolish and pleasant. I don't know if it was the heat or the fact that I'd clogged my pores up with sunscreen but I was sweating like some kind of sweaty animal.

I got about 1/3 of the side flower bed done, 1/3 of two of the small beds at the back, and about 1/4 of the patio done. I had to pack it in, the heat was killing me. As an excuse to take a break, I talked Joe into having breakfast with me on the patio. Bad idea, for me anyway. I think that eating in the sun did something to me (or just the sun, never mind eating cereal in it) because I felt nauseous for the rest of the morning. Blech! Right now, we're waiting for things to cool down a bit so we can get back outside and mow and weed-eat.

Our neighbour will be so happy. The crazy lady who lives next door to us has been going ape-shit over the weeds at the side of our driveway. It was not intentional at first, that those weeds never got whacked. About three mows ago, I was weed-eating while Mark mowed. I had done the whole back yard, the north side of the house and the front lawn. By the time I got to the south side of the house (the side next to the crazy lady), I ran out of that fishing line stuff that goes into the whacker. It took me a couple of weeks to replace it. One Saturday (the day we were going out to try to find the line stuff that goes into the whacker actually), she was outside on her front lawn with one of her landscapers (have I mentioned that she's in her 90's and has a different bunch of landscapers/contractors at her place every week). Ordinarily, I do my very best to avoid making eye contact with her. This time, she hollers at me "thanks for getting rid of those weeds." I just smiled and waved as we backed out of the drive. All of a sudden, I realized that my un-trimmed weeds must be driving her crazy. Since then, I have deliberately avoided pulling them (yes, in case you haven't figured it out yet I can be a bit of a bitch). Right now, they are about 2.5 feet high and even I'm sick of looking at them so they'll be gone tonight. I am sure it's been driving her absolutely around the bend though because she has to see them every time she pops her head out the door.

Now, I don't want you to think that I'm a bad neighbour, we don't have a lot of contact with our neighbours but we're basically friendly (we do the wave thing on the way to the car and all) but we're not all lovely-dovey with them. This lady is a huge pain in the bum and sometime, I'll fill y'all in. It's actually a little funny in a sick and twisted way.

Nausea and possible heat stroke aside (yes, I am a wimp and prone to complaining about the heat), I did compile another box of books to go to goodwill, bagged up all the clothes we discarded when we were emptying the closets for the wiring project and dusted and vacuumed the house (again). Since I've been on holidays, because of the work we've been doing around the house, I've had to vacuum every day and dust, like every other day. I'm not complaining at all (not much anyway), because I'm happy that the work is getting done, but boy howdy, I didn't plan on cleaning the whole house, every day. I must say though, doing a little bit every day is soooo much better than creating a huge mess and trying to clean it all up at once, at the end (like I did when we were painting last summer -- see, sometimes I do learn from my past mistakes).

Mark's doing all the wiring of plugs, switches and breakers on his own (he only needed Pat's help to run the actual wires to and from places). We ended up at Rona again this afternoon. We're there almost every Saturday now it seems. I do like that their store does not smell like Harvey's (this means YOU Home Depot) but I'm not crazy about how we seem to drop $100 every time we go in there. This should be end of the spending for a while. We've decided that once these two rooms are completed, we're going to spend the rest of the summer relaxing. We have a couple of days off again later on this month and then a week in August and I don't want to do much of anything at all. Of course it probably won't end up like that but that's my plan at this point in time.

Helpful Consumer Tip Of The Day: If you need mini-blinds, buy them at Bouclair. We finally ripped out the last set of crappy, previous house owner mini-blinds today. I knew that I could get them cheaper at Bouclair than at Rona or Home Depot but I had no idea how much. I found a set of 36" x 64" blinds for our office window and thought I was getting a deal at $12.49 plus tax. When I got to the cash, they rang up at $10.86 including tax. Score!! When I commented on the bargain, the cashier told me that some of their customers don't even wash their blinds anymore. Because they sell them so cheap, a lot of folks just throw out the old ones when they get dirty and replace them with new ones. Now, even I think that is kind of lazy but for $10 a blind, I almost can't blame them.