Incompetent or super slow

Hello again. My pages seem not too direly affected by the great d-land crash, although I see my buddy list has disappeared from the menu, to be replaced by the tag that usually stands in for it. It’s fortunate for me that the falling down of the site coincided with a few crazy-busy work days, followed by a weekend away, so no updates have been prevented from getting through at this end of the process, anyhoo.

I broke the exercise drought of the last few weeks with a weekend on the family farm with Mariella and Archie. Among other feats I performed were pruning a climbing rose, up a ladder no less, and even if it did require Mariella to reach the higher branches, I have the scratches to show for my handiwork. After a day and a half, I was blooming in my competence with loppers and secateurs. This was good, as the few days beforehand I was rather worried. What if in helping out I was no help? I’ve taught long enough to know that feeling of creeping regret that comes when the people you’ve asked to assist turn out to be either incompetent or super slow.

Apparently I am neither, even if Mariella’s mother did do in ten minutes the second half of the weeding that took me an hour the previous day.

Then there was the cooking and the eating and the drinking and the recreating. Although short trips away from my dogs are the worst, I had the working dogs to practise my insouciant greetings on, then slip around the back of the house to give a proper friendly greeting to. But how strange it is to have dogs nearby that don’t follow you at every little task–and stranger still to sleep inside at night with the dogs definitely out.

Domestic life on a farm may be the perfect combination of gardening and eating and drinking. If I could include writing and somehow eliminate the deaths of animals in the green beyond, it would be irresistible (pace Miss Hiss).

Other random thoughts that floated across the surface of my brain at the weekend may or may not have included the following:

- why do I wake in a state of panic and regret right about the time my body shifts from drunkenness to sobriety (usually around four in the morning)? Is my liver (surely the seat of all emotions) cleaving to the alcohol as it’s leaving?- Mariella cannot see the point of bagels, least of all when they are served with cream cheese. Additionally, she maintains that walking daily past Parliament to work frees her of any duty to be political.

- Since five or more drinks in one evening qualifies as binge-drinking, the trick is to drink from glasses large enough to get through a bottle of wine in four refills or fewer.

- although the relatives whom I hymn in these pages are mostly on my mother’s side, it is the paternal uncles and aunts, one to seven, (last bewildering me way back when and then some) of whom I often speak in person. I asked Mariella if I tell too many bitter anecdotes of them, to which she said, “no, because your family’s [pause] special“. Take that, special relatives!

And then, this evening as I was driving home from work, a cat shot out in front of me with so little room to spare that when I braked, I not only screeched and heated my brake pads to smelly, but my rear wheels spun around on the seal, driving up a cloud of gravel dust. I pulled over, all adrenalised, but could see no sign of the kitty behind me. I hope it’s sitting on its couch in placid serenity while I’m still a little east of jittery.

Once I start settling down again, I can turn my mind to the small capillary nevus that has grown on my scalp, for whose removal I shall next week be having anaesthetic injected into my head, followed by a dinky cauterising of my head and the cutting out of the nasty little bleeder from my head. My GP is raising the possibility of trimming back the hair around it in order to perform this minor violence on me, but at that I may draw the line.