Tuesday

wet django
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I made it back to work and it's annoying: I have too much to do to be at work. Actually, I got a lot done yesterday but it's never enough. This time of year is killer and now I can't remember why I wanted the spring or the summer to come. Yesterday I fixed up all the garden in front of the house and mowed the front yard and vacuumed most of the house as well as dragging my sorry, hungover ass to the library (soon I will have read every single book in the fantasy & SF section of the West Asheville library - woe! woe is me!) K-Mart and the laundromat. At some point in the next few days - and the fewer the better or the grass will be 3 feet tall again - the back yards (yeah, there's more than one) have to be mowed. In my spare time, everything needs watering and I have to get the weed whacker whacking away at the tall grass in the front that the mower can't get to. Too much damn work - does the earth not understand that I need to wallow around in my bed rereading everything PG Wodehouse ever wrote and occasionally sniffling softly?

To top it all off, something got into the vegetable garden and ate most of the lettuce and two tomato seedlings down to the ground. Fuck. I should have positioned the garden in the dog pen. And I put up a fence and everything - okay, there are certain gaps in the fence, like the six or so inches at the bottom all the way around, but hey, there is a fence. Clearly, there is no other solution than for me to strip to a loincloth, paint myself green and lie in the grass (mental note - don't mow yet) with a blowgun, waiting for the culprit to appear. Traps are useless. When the kids were small we made any number of traps out of painted cardboard boxes precariously balanced on sticks with tasty treats inside. The intended trappee, you see, (which in our case we were hoping for box turtles, a fast and wily prey,) will knock the stick over in his/her haste to get to the delicious browning iceberg lettuce or fat carrot and then kablam, the box will fall over on top of him and hey presto, instant pet box turtle or bunny rabbit! Or werewolf, but that always sort of wrecks the mood. The problem with the box trap is that no animal on earth is stupid enough to fall for it. All you can catch with a cardboard box is old Railroad Joe the wino - and then you have to use a half bottle of Thunderbird Express instead of a carrot. Hobos won't go for carrots.

Actually, I know what we need. We need one of those toy motion detector things from Toys R Us that they sell kids to drive their siblings to murder. Those things are awesome and they let you record your own message to startle the intruder. You set the thing up - they're not discreet, being large, plastic and neon, but, hey, they're cheap - and when something that hasn't noticed the trap trips the electric eye, a mangled electronic version of your very own voice will boom forth upon the land, saying, in my case from the last time I tried this, "Get the fuck off the couch!" That was supposed to make the dogs spring off the couch with alacrity but unfortunately it just made them bark unceasingly while digging holes through the center of the couch in the off chance that I might be trapped underneath. Good samaritans, my dogs. Still, if I go get one of those things and it says "Get the fuck out of my garden, vermin, before I shoot you!" it might work. Unless, of course, what we've got are the sophisticated consumer rabbits of the 21st century, who sneer at robotic voices. Then it's back to the blowgun and the loincloth.