You Should See What It Looks Like From Here

There is something so satisfying about doing yard work.

Now, you could work all week long, do the best job you can do, and get paid for it, but still not feel as good as you do when you have cleaned up the yard. Today was the first full attack on the outdoor space at the weekend house. A long winter means piles of leaves, hundreds of broken branches and a general untidiness everywhere.

Oh yeah, then there's the garage. From the time the weather starts to turn cold, the garage takes a beating. Christmas decorations, cement critters and odds & ends, all end up in the garage. The one thing that never ends up there is the car. Thirteen years after buying the house, we have yet to park the car in it. It's basically just an outdoor closet. So the garage was cleaned and organized a bit too.

The work is hard and exhausting, but the results are worth it. Though it still doesn't look like spring here; the only flowers in bloom are the daffodils and the trees have only begun to bud, a day of raking, blowing and sweeping, does make a difference.

And at the end of the day, after a hot shower and a cold beer, you can look out over what you've accomplished and smile. It looks great. While the overall pristine effect lasts only for a couple of days, it's still worth it. Next weekend it will be time to throw down some mulch, bring out the cement critters and plant some flowers in the window boxes. And so it goes.

Somewhere around July, we're sick of it. Tired of weeding, tired of cutting the grass, just tired. And it's hot. So for today in the last week of April, I'm just going to be glad to have gotten a good chunk of work done.

Tomorrow, I won't be able to move.
And so it goes.

To Sleep Perchance To Dream

It seems the older you get, a certain topic of conversation seems to become more and more frequent. Take a guess what it is. Well yeah, sex is always up there, and if you spend a lot of time on twitter, bacon and vodka are both talked to death. But there is one subject that I seem to talk about with everyone I know.

Sleep. Or the lack of it.

Even she has insomnia 

Does anyone really sleep anymore? I know I don't. On any given night, four and a half to five hours is the norm.  Six hours, that's like a mini-vacation. I cannot remember when was the last decade that I actually slept for eight hours. But more and more, conversations I have with friends and family begin with "How did you sleep?" And you know what, no one sleeps well.

This morning I woke up at three, tossed for forty-five minutes and jumped in the shower before four. Tried to catch another little nap after the shower, but no such luck. Once my mind starts thinking about how behind I am in this or that, well I may as well get up and start the day.

I love hearing the experts tell me how important it is for adults to get the proper amount of sleep, eight to eight and a half hours. Now, my day starts around five, for me to get that much sleep, I'd be hitting the sack at nine o'clock. Well now that's not gonna happen, so it's time to suck it up and accept the consequences. This week I think lack of sleep causes dementia, but I could be wrong... or demented.

It is now 8:37 and I'm getting sleepy. Maybe a nine o'clock curfew isn't too bad after all. Anyone wanna chat around four? See ya then.

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This Is What Happens When You Don't Have Time... Or Patience

In Jersey, sometimes we get a bad rap. They say we're loud, obnoxious, rude and crass, among other things. Yeah, so what of it? Mostly we are just impatient, everything else is a by-product of "I don't have time for this shit."

For example, two recent incidents in New Jersey drive home this point to the extreme. The first involved two rival shuttle bus drivers and a baseball bat. It seems that one of the bus drivers felt the other one was muscling in on his territory and decided to take things into his own hands. See this is almost Jersey law; if you muscle in on my territory, I'm gonna use a little muscle on you. Unfortunately law enforcement doesn't view it quite the same way, so they came and hauled away both the bat and the guy swinging it. So how does this involve impatience? Well, obviously the way this should have been handled was with batman talking to his superiors about a severe breach of etiquette. But who has time for that shit? No, it's much easier to just pull out the bat that is stashed behind the seat (what? you all don't have a bat stashed behind the seat?) and smack the other guy upside the head. Problem solved quickly. Except when the other guy calls the cops as he is running away from the bat.

The second incident involves three drunks, a deli and a chicken. See, after getting toasted in one of the neighborhood bars, the three stooges realized they were hungry. "I gots to get me some chicken" was the battle cry. So they go to the nearest deli where the counter worker informs the tipsy trio that there was no more chicken to be had. After all it was 7:30 pm and pretty close to quitting time. Oh man, who has time for this shit? No chicken, don't tell me that. Now, most normal people would have just ordered a ham sandwich at that point, but not these guys. No, the brains of the outfit decides to pull a knife on the deli worker. Too bad he didn't realize there was another worker in the deli, and he was on the phone calling the police. Cops for sure, have no patience when inebriated idiots pull out knives.

Axl Rose sang it best. "All we need is just a little patience." But then, he didn't live in Jersey.

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