Day 1559

Weekends come with a bonus these days. There are no complicated cancer protocols to follow on weekends. Dash gets a little rest and the dogs can just be normal dogs. Even though it was a normal weekend filled with the usual weekend chores, it seemed much easier to deal with than the previous week.

Since the weather was nice, I thought I'd do some gardening and finish up what the landscaping guys forgot. I went to Home Depot and bought a couple of flats of Liriope to fill in a few bare areas. I thought the landscape guys were going to do this themselves, but apparently we weren't on the same wavelength. They did have extra Monkey Grass in their bid, but when I told them to fill in the bare areas, they started on the East side of the yard and methodically worked their way West. I thought they'd start with the worst looking areas and proceed to slightly less shabby areas until the Liriope ran out. There would have been plenty of ground cover to go around if they'd done this. Instead, they just told me that they ran out of Liriope before they even reached the big bare spot on the West side of the yard.

I should never do gardening. I'm somewhat of a perfectionist and I hate mud and dirt. Gardening is all about mud and dirt, so I always make a bigger mess than I anticipate. It took a while, but the yard now looks the way I imagined it would. I also took some of the white pea gravel I had the guys add to the path and moved it to the small decorative circles that serve as sculpture bases. Just like the Liriope, there was already plenty of pea gravel to accomplish what I wanted. The landscapers just didn't seem to know what I wanted to do with it.  I found the extra gravel I needed under the garbage cans behind the back fence. It wasn't doing much good there, so I shoveled it into buckets and moved it to the two circular areas on either side of the curving path. After I was finished, there was still plenty of left-over gravel.

Everything looks great now, but my gardening efforts took so much longer than I anticipated that I didn't make it to the gym after all. By the way my shoulder feels now, I probably got more exercise gardening than I would have at the gym anyway.

I'll be real glad when my Hepatitis C treatments are finished. Now that my Hemoglobin levels are low, I find that I'm frequently getting nosebleeds in addition to waking up with a cold every morning. When I was making the bed this morning, I leaned over to straighten the sheets and noticed little drops of blood on the pillows. "What the hell," I thought. "Where is this blood coming from?" Then I realized that it was dripping from my nose. It's a nuisance, but a very minor nuisance compared to getting a liver transplant sometime later in life.

Janet and I tried to attach our little bird scarecrows to small suction cups to make them easier to place on the cars. It was an idea that should have worked, since the suction cups seemed to stick easily to a variety of things around the house. They wouldn't stick to the cars though. I don't know why. Oh, well. This was a minor failure. The yard looks nice. The dogs are relaxed and happy. It was a nice weekend.

Ariel is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day