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Today being Monday and all and with a lunch appointment already planned with one of my most favorite people, I piddled around all morning doing this and that and generally catching up on stuff that I had let go for a while.  Things like folding laundry, mopping floors and some of the more mundane and tedious things that we as civilized people are supposed to do. One thing I do draw the line at is dusting. I don’t do much dusting until I can no longer make out what the dust is covering up, say once every 5 years or so. It’s funny, but I can make stack of books or papers or something similar and that stack may not get touched in a long time, sometimes quite literally years.  That is one way that I know if I need to keep the papers any longer or if it is safe to re-cycle them as quite obviously, if I have not visited that particular stack in a while, then I am not going to ever again. Of course, the minute that I do re-cycle, I immediately need something from that stack. Funny how it goes that way.

With all of the animals including the dogs and cats, the floors do tend to get a little dirty at times especially after it rains so periodically, when I can no longer stand it or if I start tripping over the leaves and branches and sometimes a dead rat or two that Ginny has brought in,  I get out the mop and bucket and go at it. Actually, because I have ceramic tile floors throughout the house, it is a fairly easy job and in truth, gets done pretty frequently, for me…

I made sure that I finished what I was doing with plenty of time to get to the Olive Garden to meet my friend and spent a very enjoyable hour with her. My friend had already retired from her Management job with the State and being the noble person that she is, decided to go back to work full-time but in a different capacity and now has an 8:00 to 5:00 schedule. I thought about this when she made the move and I know that she did it for all of the right reasons. Personally, I can’t imagine being tied to that sort of routine ever again and really enjoy my time in retirement to come and go as I please. When I say 8:00 to 5:00, I am speaking metaphorically as my friend is an early riser like at 4:30 am and spends time in the gym and still gets to work before 6:30 am.

I am one of those on the other end of the spectrum as I go to bed very late sometimes at 1:30 am and then I don’t get up until 8:30 am or so. I guess we all have our own habits and our biological clocks re-act in different ways.

The real reason that I am writing this is to bemoan the fact that I really missed out today on the opportunity to spend time out in the garden without getting totally cooked as I have been these last few days with the temperature reaching 106 degrees. I didn’t really notice how hot it was while I was working and some of the time, I was actually in one of the ponds doing some work which was very cooling. Today, after my lunch date, I came home full of energy ready to go back out and work some more. I made the mistake of sitting down in front of the computer and spent the rest of the afternoon indoors.

Meanwhile, we were having a cold spell if you can call 90 degrees cold but compared to 106, it’s downright freezing and I missed out on the opportunity to be out in it. What you say, it must have been important enough to stay indoors and work on the computer but the truth is, it made me so tired that instead of leaving it and going outside and expending  some honest energy working in the yard, I chose to take a nap. So much for my yard work on a perfectly cool day.

Don’t worry, I won’t make that mistake again and tomorrow come 90 or 100 plus degrees, whatever Mother Nature throws at us, I will be out in it, slaving away in the hot sun, just doing my thing and, I might add, enjoying every minute of it.

Now if I could just change my TV watching habits so that I could get up early and do my work before the heat of the day. Oh well…