Dog Toys Grow on Trees

Razzle likes to play with a ball.  She'll retrieve it if you throw it for her.  You can't have it back though.  She shoves her slobbery toy into your hand and makes you play tug for it.

The peach tree is producing right now, and not just food for people anymore.  The windfalls turn into--you guessed it--dog toys for Razzle.  She chooses not to differentiate between a tennis ball or a globular fruit.

Who knew that dog toys grew on trees?  When you live in the garden of Eden like we do, that's what happens.  Even Jeremy Renner's dogs aren't as spoiled as ours.

Shoes

I'm not a fan of foot injuries, but good shoes are just so...imaginary.  Occasionally I can find a pair with arch support, and once in a while I can find some with cushion, but both luxuries in one shoe is apparently too much to ask, and I suppose if such a product existed, it would be ugly and/or far too expensive.

It would be cool if somebody with too much time and money on their hands could spend some time inventing comfortable affordable attractive footwear, but evidently it's more fun to make satan tennies with people blood inside because I don't know why.  Thanks for less than nothing, world.

So for now I'm grateful that it's barefoot season, and for the record, it is absolutely legal to go barefoot in all fifty states no matter what anybody says, and even Jeremy Renner can't stop you.

No Means No

When someone's making an effort to quit marijuana, you don't invite him to smoke some with you.

When a scholar says she needs to stop wasting money and start spending more time studying, you don't beg her to go out for coffee with you every other day.

When an alcoholic is recovering, you refrain from bringing alcohol around.

When a patient declines an injection, you don't continue to "strongly recommend", and you most definitely don't give her the shot anyway.

For the love of Jeremy Renner, people, let's revisit personal boundaries.

It's Always Something

The instant you begin to believe you have your life figured out, a monkey wrench appears out of nowhere.  I don't even know what a monkey wrench is, but I seem to encounter them often.

This spring, it's a new weed.  It's popping up everywhere, and it's not just any weed.  It's a baby tree.  Now, it's practically an annual festival around here to spend weeks uprooting little maples, because our Mama maple tree has the babies.  (Before you go all arbor day environmentalist on me, please understand you can't have a hundred and eleven million maple trees on just one acre.  And you can't have them growing just one inch apart.  Or in your sidewalk crack.  Or adjacent to the foundation of your house.)  But these aren't baby maples. They're baby walnuts. How?

There's been a walnut tree here for decades.  It hasn't been fruitful and multiplied this way ever before.  What is happening?

Jasmine.

Of all the dogs who have been part of our family, none have been as obsessive as Jasmine about burying her treasure.  Anything Jasmine finds interesting to her, she buries for later.  Bones, mice, milk cartons, bolts, tennis balls, feathers, pop cans, gloves, heels of bread, and apparently, walnuts.  Thanks, my furry little garden buddy.  You excel at making sure I have plenty to do.

She'd better not get a hold of my Jeremy Renner dvds.

If Your Family is Awesome

If your family is awesome, your Mother's Day might go something like this.

Somebody cooks you a delicious hot breakfast.  Your out of state daughters call you first thing in the morning. You get hugs and kisses and happy-day greetings as your people wake up one by one.

Your family goes to church with you and on your way out the door they find a long stemmed flower on your porch from #MothersDayMarauders, and at church your pastor delivers an uplifting and encouraging message, because your church is also awesome.

There's an iced coffee for you to sip after church while the sons make you lunch, plant and water your vegetable and flower gardens, dust your life-size Jeremy Renner cardboard cutout, and shower you with exotic potted plants and your favorite candies and goldfish for your pond.

Your sons bake you brownies (from scratch even, not a boxed mix) with nuts in them because even though they don't like brownies with nuts, they know that you do.

Maybe this all sounds too good to be true, but that's because things like this only happen if your family is awesome.

Angel Got a Wing Clipped

Don't wash your dishes too hard.  Angel Doll did this, and the resulting broken glass sliced the tendon and nerves in her thumb.  Thanks to the absolute stupidity of meaningless rules imposed by exploiters of the fashionable new illness that's currently ruling the faux-civilized world, surgery to repair her opposable digit was delayed for a stinkin week.  (Do I have an attitude about this?  Yes.  Yes I do.)

Now Angel Doll is trying to cram forty-seven college papers into the last two weeks of the semester by typing with her non-dominant left hand.

It ought to be a snap for someone who in the past month since clipping her little wing has learned to tie her shoes, shower and dress, cook her meals, eat with chopsticks, and wash dishes (not too hard) without her dominant hand.

Even Jeremy Renner couldn't be that cool.

Gardening Hacks

Spring is here, and if you're interested in gardening but don't know much about it, let me offer a few items I've learned over the years.  I've been a gardener all my adult life.  Not a good one, but still.

I could have been way better at it, like Rapunzel, my mother, but there were books to read and music to hear while I was growing up and she was gardening.  These are things either she didn't teach me because she assumed I was paying attention which I wasn't, or she did teach me and she assumed I was paying attention which I wasn't.

Seeds may not germinate if they're eleventy years old.

Anise, anise hyssop, and hyssop are not the same things.  Pay attention to botanical names such as Gardenerus newbius.

"Annual" doesn't mean the plant grows back every spring.  It means you have to replant or repurchase every year.

"Perennials" only grow back each season if the dog doesn't dig them up and the cats don't latrine them to death.

Free range chickens sound neat but are the opposite.  They are weapons of mass destruction and will destroy all that you hold dear.  You're better off setting your money on fire than trying to keep a couple of cute hens in your private Eden.

If you take your life-size Jeremy Renner cardboard cutout into the garden with you, keep him out of the sprinkler.

Carry a portable timer or alarm clock on your person.  Five minutes in the garden is three and a half hours in earth time.  Dinner will burn, you'll miss your appointments, and the laundry will rot in the washer.

Follow me for more tips.