My neighbor is mowing his front yard and I feel envious. We don’t have a working mower at the moment, and even though I actually enjoy mowing and weed-whacking, it sets off my tendinitis. I’m considering getting the weed-whacker out anyway. The yard guy that I was so thrilled about came by when I was at the office on Thursday to mow and clean up the yard, but he couldn’t find a parking place so he left. So frustrating! The Back Forty is looking like a prairie, which I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t breed tiger mosquitoes.
There’s something about clearing paths and breaking trails that lights up my brain when I mow. Mowing was my job growing up, and I liked it so much that I would mow neighbor’s yards, the sides of the road, and the community building lot too. Now that I have hindsight, I guess that was one way that I coped with my anxiety.
This week was the last of the semester, and things should calm down for a while, but you never know these days. We used to go on vacation in May for this reason. This year our best-laid plan is to go to Ireland with a side trip to Lisbon, Portugal in September. Hopefully the EU will be open for us by then – it sounds like it is moving in that direction. I have good deals on AirBNB apartments in western Ireland (for a week!) and in downtown Lisbon, near the museums and the river in one of the arty neighborhoods. Both can be cancelled up to a week before the rental begins. I hope that my sister and brother-in-law will join us, but that’s beginning to look doubtful. In the meantime, we’ll probably go back to the lake once or twice in the next few months.
Beautiful weather today. Sunshine and breezes, high around 70. I’m glad that I can enjoy it because I had my second shingles vaccination late Thursday afternoon and it kicked my butt yesterday. I barely felt the shot, but afterward I barely slept and had a headache for about 24 hours, not to mention an extremely sore arm. Last night I finally fell asleep with an ice pack, slept for 12 hours, and awoke feeling good. Later we will go to a get-together for our department at Oden Brewing, which has a nice outside beer garden just around the corner from my house.
We moved Frida into the cage with Bernie yesterday. After trying to catch her (we never have handled her) we finally held her cage up to Bernie’s cage and opened the two doors between them. She flew into Bernie’s cage. It was that simple. They are both exhibiting stress behaviors and Bernie has been chasing Frida around more than she’d like, but otherwise they are getting along and were kissy-kissy this morning.
I have so much that I’d like to get done this weekend. I didn’t get any weaving done because I stabbed myself in the finger with a knife on Sunday! It didn’t hurt much, amazingly, but boy, did it bleed and I thought that I might have to get stitches because it was deep. Of course my vaso vagel syncope popped out and I had to lay on the kitchen floor for about 30 minutes. Sandy stayed with me and helped me. We did pretty good first aid because it has closed up nicely and hasn’t hurt much, but working in the yard and washing dishes and weaving were out for this week. Hopefully I will have a few photos by tomorrow evening.
slowly she turned 