Ya Want A Scooby Snack?

Housework is one of those things I prefer to avoid. Not that anyone else will take care of the mess. I guess I shouldn't say mess, I'm not swine, I'm just a little friendly with the dust bunnies. They congregate along the baseboards where they're less likely to end up stuck to the bottom of somebody's shoe and I drop them offerings on occasion so they won't starve. You could say we have a mutual respect for one other.

Sunshine coupled with mild temperatures makes it virtually impossible to focus on indoor activity, no matter how important the rest of the world thinks the task may be. It just doesn't hold a candle to the dire urgency with which I attack leaf raking, mole stomping, and hole filling. The hole filling thing is a stroke of genius I credit to Merlin.

Being of the canine persuasion, my perfect partner in crime eventually gave in to the urge to dig. Apparently much more weight conscious than his human, he has religiously ritualized the act of burying each offering of affection before it is deemed edible. So if there is a beautiful day beckoning me, I simply crack the back door and hand Merlin a Scooby Snack and watch him trot off to one of his favorite stash sites, right next to Johns truck, obviously, so John will do the about face as he's leaving and say, "Honey, your dog dug another hole. You need to fix that before somebody falls in it". I then cross up my face and grudgingly abandon my swiffering and head to the garden shed. Works every time. I love that dog!

Today was a wonderful day. We did the dog cookie thing and then Merlin lounged in his big plaid doggy pillow on the front porch while I nit-picked the flower beds along the front of the house and then heaped the cedar mulch for that neat cedary look. Afterward we took a basket of plants I needed to thin out and hiked down to the creek where we plopped them along the stream bed that runs through my mushroom hunting heaven. While there we gathered some moss to plant between the path stones in the herb garden and watched the sunset while chucking clods of dirt at miscreant mousers attempting to make my mint stink. Today I discovered the pyramid shaped mounds that gave the mint section a striking resemblance to the Valley of the Kings. Merlin and I decided that we wouldn't be growing any mint or anything else there if we didn't do something about it. So we'll squirt them, shoo them, and knock them in the head with dirt clods until they find another soft piece of earth in an unimportant corner somewhere. It's not like we're lacking in land.

Tomorrow I'll do that housework I didn't have enough time for today... unless the sunshine comes back and asks us to come out and play, in which case I will be told to train my dog or fill in his handy work once again.
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3/19/2005 0:2 AM