I don't expect My Dear Sweet Sainted Wife to be home when I go home for lunch today ... it's time for another trip up to Columbia, Mo., where granddaughters Leah-Bo and Alexandra have a variety of weekend activities coming up that are a must-view for my better half.
Things like T-ball games, soccer games, etc.
Seems like that's going around a little bit lately ... ad rep Stacy Riley is off somewhere or another watching her high school senior son play in a regional baseball tournament, and editor Andy Weld is off someplace else watching his freshman daughter play in a similar softball tournament.
That means I pick up Andy's slack and a little bit of Stacy's and that means I better hurry up and finish writing this column.
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My Dear Sweet Sainted Wife has been pining for the granddaughters for a month or more now, and that's about as long as she can go. I'd like to go with her but I've got things to attend to around here and that's just the way it is.
If it weren't for having to mess with the dogs, I'd get along all right. But they're so spoiled to being taken out every afternoon to the old air base for an hour or so of running around, chasing rabbits and skunks and rats and such, they start raising the roof once it gets about two hours til sundown and they know it's about to be their turn to go out.
Rain or shine, they go out.
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A couple of people commented about my little yarn about Sarah Austin and her snake problem, but I don't think anything serious ever came out of it. It wasn't really a yarn, though, it just happened the way I said it happened.
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Maybe it did the Cardinals some good to get rained out the other day, they actually won a game for Michael Wacha yesterday afternoon.
I can just imagine how tough it would be to be on the road as much as they were the first month and change; I think it was a modern-day record for bad scheduling.
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I spent the better part of last weekend up at my place on the Current River. Even though I did actually dive in and swim around a bit, it was not really water weather yet.
In other words, I froze my behind off.
But I was hot and bothered from mowing the yard and hopped in the golf cart, slid the quarter mile down to the river and jumped in anyway.
I made the tactical mistake of buying a little Poulan push mower to handle the maybe quarter acre yard I've got up there, and added to that tactical mistake by waiting til nearly the middle of May to mow it.
That yard has a little Bermuda grass in it, but that hasn't really come in yet. It's primarily some kind of fescue and just about every weed known to man.
And it was long (knee high) and it was wet.
I had to hold the mower up at a 45 degree angle and inch forward about a foot, then lower the blade down real slow-like to cut the stuff without choking out the motor.
That quarter acre that usually takes an hour to mow took six hours to mow and nearly killed me.
I'd mow for 15 or 20 minutes and take a 15 or 20 minute break.
I had to, because once I started sweating the gnats and sweat bees would attack and I had nowhere to hide.
Got to find me somebody up there to mow it, that's for sure.
The guy I bought the place from used to mow it for $15 with a tractor pulling about a 60 inch mower, kind of like mowing the rough on a golf course, but he's retired now and I haven't made time to find me somebody else.
Big mistake, big.
dtennyson@blythevillecourier.com