Not Such A Fun Saturday

Today was the worst kind of hot soup like weather day. Russ came out to work in the garden with me. Now the squirrels are just taunting me. They are eating the stolen tomatoes on the top of the garden gate and leaving enough evidence for me to know what they are doing.

Most of my zucchini plants have gotten boring worms and the stems are eaten out rendering the rest of the plant useless. I pulled them out and Russ composted them. I had okra that had not been picked while I was at the beach so it had grown to baseball bat size and hardness. There were plenty of peppers and one beautiful eggplant.

After pulling weeds and picking as many almost ready to not be green tomatoes as I could we had to stop. Both Russ and I were blind from the sweat pouring in our eyes. And this was in the morning. We gave up on outdoor pursuits and went inside for cool showers and equally boring indoor work.

I had been noticing that the shelves in Russ’ office were not only full of the most random things, but also a king’s ransom amount of dust, if dust were valuable. I decided I would take everything off his selves on two book cases and clean all the stuff and the shelves. It was not Russ’ idea of fun when I asked him to look at the accumulation of things and see if anything could be tossed, recycled, given away, moved to a better location or filed.

He did a good job with all these treasures, like three old flip phones, a bobble head likeness of himself that his team had given him, old metal piggy banks and mementos from Carter, which I put back on the shelves. We pared the books down to ones he loved and did away with odd balls that people had given him and he had no interest in. It took an inordinate number of dust rags to clean everything, but I think his lungs will thank me. He still has his eccentric collection of mechanical toys and wind up moneys, but it will be much easier for me to dust.

The good news was it was so much cooler and not so sweat inducing inside that I didn’t mind working on this project. Please just don’t make me weed in this weather.