Little Bites

"You've got about 30 minutes, Riddick."  SM says to me the other day.



I stand up straight, a handful of Bermuda grass in my hand. 

I give him a "Huh?" kinda look.

SM points up at the cloudy sky.

"Oh!  Till the sun comes out!" I smile at him.  "Good one!"

SM is making reference to a SciFi movie called The Chronicles of Riddick where Riddick has to outrace the sun on the planet Crematoria or get "cremated" literally.  (Yes, I'm a SciFi geek...)





All this week we've had very humid, mid 80's weather.  Nice enough I guess but not really what I'd hoped for.  It is October after all.  I figured I'd have the windows open, cooler breezes blowing.  Low humidity, chilly nights.   

What we've got right now is early Summer weather.  It's soaking wet out in the mornings from overnight showers but any clouds or rain that's around is usually burned off by noon. 

Then it gets hot.  81 can feel like 90 with this humidity.

And if there's one thing this hot-flash Mama is allergic to lately is the sun. 
And the heat. 
And the sweat.

So I'm standing in the garden, filthy head to toe as I work on pulling the Bermuda grass out of the garden and garden pathways.  It's tough on the back but necessary if I want to reclaim this patch of ground from the lawn that existed here before.

"That's OK.  I think I'm done for today anyway."  I tell SM.  "My back can only take about 2 hours of this stuff."  

Stepping over the fence and dragging the trash can with me that I've been tossing the grass into.  I heave-ho the grass onto the burn pile, put the trash can back into the garden and shuck off my muddy, wet gloves.  Muddy boots get left on the back porch to dry and all my muddy clothes get tossed into the washing machine.

That's the pattern to my days this week.  What I want to do is kinda limited by what I can do.  And the weather has been dictating my tasks.

It's too humid to paint, so instead I spend the mornings out in the garden until my back says "enough" or I get too hot, whichever comes first.

Then I head into the house to tackle some deep cleaning like window washing or cleaning the blinds.  Living with my little packrat (SM) for the past 26 years, there's always some decrapification that also needs to happen.  I'm trying to work through one room at a time, ceiling to floor.  Cleaning, tossing trash and creating donation piles. 

Yesterday I took a bunch of 30+ year old college and reference books to Goodwill.  SM never could part with them.  We've lugged those books around for years.  They take up space and he never reads them.  I told SM last week that I was going to be ruthless.  If he wanted to be here to help me organize the crap in our lives he was welcome to.  But if not, then he was just going to have to get over it.  I would decide what would stay and what would go.  "Speak now or forever hold your peace."  I told him.

Now don't be thinking I'm going through everything with a fine toothed comb.  I'm not.  I don't have that kind of time.  It's just that there's obvious stuff that needs to go.

It's funny.  I made a list of things that I wanted to get done this week but really...There's so much stuff on it that it would take me a month to cross it all off.

Oh well...Little bites. 

It's still progress.

And thankfully the weather is supposed to break this weekend.  Less humid and cooler at night.  (Yeah!)

Next week though...Brrrr.  Have a great weekend Ya'll.