The Day So Far...

...has been okay with only one exception - more on that later.

I started off at about 0530 this morning when I heard Abby whining at the top of the cellar stairs. Notice I did not say the top of the basement stairs; I guess that's because we had a coal cellar in both of the apartment building in which I lived as a kid into my twenties. Even though often used synonymously - a basement is often thought of as the downstairs (below ground) portion of a house used for storage or for a recreational room. On the other hand, a cellar is a below ground room beneath a dwelling in which things like wine or coal usually are stored in bulk. In our house, we have no coal and little wine stored in our cellar but I do have a little bit of lead, copper and brass - so for me it is our cellar.  Way did I go off on a tangent...

Back to Abby our long haired Chihuahua (actually first named by me as: A B Something & A B Normal). Well she was up at the top of the stairs, prone and looking down at me while whining away with her I want to go outside whine. So up and away I was to let her out. Right after I let her out, I let Pepe from his cage to go outside and spritz the bushes - his usual morning routine. He sleeps in a cage, one of those used to transport dogs to the vet and such, every night that we do not forget to tell him to go to bed. He goes in on his own when you tell him go to bed. All of our dogs, even our much larger mutt Mimi will get in that cage to take a nap during the day. They love it. Anyway, Pepe being a male is a pisser both figuratively and literally and he will pee in the cellar so we keep him locked up at night. he makes it through every night without having to go. The thing is, if we live him uncaged, he may get up in the middle of the night and come to where one of us is sleeping and spin round and around with his I gotta go outside spin but he makes zero noise when doing it. He rarely whines to go out. If you are not awake and if he does not awaken you when he does it, he will go and pee wherever in the cellar that he pleases. So locked up at night he stays. Then, Mimi decided to join the other two and she came up from the cellar to do her thing outside.

Once they were back inside, I gave them fresh water and fed them breakfast. It was then that Lucy, the last of our three Chihuahuas graced us with her presence - she had been sleeping upstairs. They all wolfed down their morning meal and back outside they all went - well for Lucy it was her first time outside today.

After that, I made a pot of coffee. As that was brewing, I grabbed one of the leftover Bratwursts, from yesterday's dinner, from the fridge and threw it in a frying pan with some butter and some browned onions. Once that had gotten nice and hot, and the onions were getting much browner than my wife had made them, I grabbed a couple of eggs and threw them in there too. That was my breakfast along with bit of tart cherry juice. It was delicious.

 

The Bratwursts were not the usual ones we get from either Forest Pork Store or Morscher's Pork Store (I highly recommend this place and that plug is absolutely gratis) nor those my brothers-in-law sometimes bring us but were from - of all places - Costco. They were Kirkland brand and I had decided to buy them on a lark. They were quite the tasty morsels - granted not as good as those from the pork stores or the brothers-in-law but yummy indeed. My wife thought they were very good and my mother-in-law said they were delicious and very good (any compliments like that from her are high praise indeed especially since I had cooked them, she often refuses to eat what I cook). I have tried only one other packaged Bratwurst before, those offered by Boar's Head; they were excellent - as good as those among the best we get. When I see them around here, I am going to get them and cook them up without telling anyone where they were from and see how well they go over. I had then just one time, while visiting Brendan in AR this past spring and we were both very surprised at how good they tasted.

Once done with breakfast and the breakfast dishes, it was already around 0700. I went back downstairs to the basement cellar watched a little bit of the news, watched a bit of some old movie or another and dicked putzed around with a couple of my guns, did this and that. Next thing I knew it was already 0830 or so. That meant the wife had already made breakfast of blueberry pancakes for her and the Then I spent about 2 hours online doing nothing of importance to anyone but me, mostly stuff related to my blog and or guns.

 

At 1030 or so, I decided to go outside and grab my brand new edge trimmer and do some edge trimming on my front law. It had not been edge trimmed in about two years. Yep, I kept on meaning to get a new edge trimmer but as I have said before and will say again right now - I am The Great Procrastinator. I found the box in the garage just where I left it about a week or more ago when I brought it home from Homer's Depot. I opened the box, took everything out of it, went outside to our small front patio, sat down at the patio table and started reading the instructions. I stopped reading after I saw how to put it together and I slapped everything in place. Then I went at trimming an edge around the lawn. The damn line kept breaking, I guess because it was hitting concrete. Not a problem if it had it automatically fed more line but was a problem cause it did not feed any and I had to take it apart about 8 to 10 times to refeed the line manually. Luckily I had bought two extra spools of line cause I went through just a bit more than two of them. It was feeding properly and I had gotten better at it by the third spool. (maybe I should read all of the instructions.)

 

Got most of it done and then my back had a spasm - I did say I'd get back to the one thing that was the exception to it having been a good day so far. Mother jumper my back has not spazzed like that in 10 to 15 years. I have been lifting lots of heavy bags of Calico Stone to put a border around one side of the backyard, potting and garden soil for planting veggies, putting in a small, paving stone, platform for our smoker and stuff like that over the past couple of weeks and I guess I threw out my back a bit two days ago. I should have waited longer before doing anything where I had to bend but shit had to be done and even though I love to procrastinate - two years had been long enough a wait for the edge trimming.

I gave myself a short break, did a bit more edging and then said screw it. There was only a small portion along my short driveway left and instead of moving my car to be able to do it, I put away the edge trimmer because I had another spasm. She who must be adored brought me some Aleve for the asking, I took them and then started to sweep up my mess. I bent over several more times but was not lugging the edge trimmer nor yanking the extension cord (it's electric) and no more spasms.

 

Got the sweeping done and put everything, for the rest of my garden work, away. I do not need to throw out the back in a worse way, so will let it rest for the remainder of the day. The wife took a look at what I had done and was quite pleased and seemed sympathetic about my back. Maybe that was because hers had been aching a couple of days ago as well. Then it was back to the cellar for me to clean up and holy cow when I looked at the clock I saw it was 2PM. Where had the time gone - I had been outside trimming, edging, pulling weeds from the cracks in the sidewalk & paving stones and then sweeping for over three hours.

 

Then what to do but sit down, once all cleaned up, with the A/C on full blast (yes it was very warm and humid outside and I had gotten soaked in my own sweat) and enjoy a Paulaner Hefe Weisse Bier. Now, as I have pointed out too many times before, I am subject to getting gout attacks and had one last weekend. Thus I drank only on two days since last Saturday - a single drink of vodka on Wednesday and a few drinks on Friday night. No beers at all because beer is the worst for the gout. I am taking a chance by having a beer today but I probably will be alright since I did not drink a lot 

this last week and had no other beers at all. I hope so anyway because I am about to have a second one. They are extremely delicious. Of course, I could have something else, maybe a vodka and lemonade (less chance of it causing gout or so said my doctor and my experience indicates she was right), but I was seriously in the mood for a couple of these fine German biers and after that edge trimming and such - I deserve them.

 
All the best,
Glenn B