aaahh, the weekend

Let's hear it for weekends. Over the past few weeks I have labored over the defense of a code enforcement board decision, the defense of the denial of a high-rise hotel, and a response to a motion to dismiss our complaint against a cable company. I will spare you the details, but there was a point early in January when everything appeared to be due at the same time and I was feeling borderline panic. Then I saw that it was not that bad - one item was due two weeks ago and it got done on time. The others were due the end of this week but another lawyer did nearly all the work on one of them, leaving me time to work on the other. By noon today I was ready to put my feet on my desk and, if I was allowed to keep a bottle of Scotch in my office, pour myself one. Now I will look good, bad or indifferent depending upon the whim of a judge who may have come to work after a bad breakfast and a fight with his or her spouse.

I'm looking at a weekend that is unseasonably warm. To my children and relatives-in-law in Boston and Philadelphia, eat your hearts out. There are only two times a year when I feel motivated to do gardening work, and the Spring gardening bug has bit me . . . in February, when they are still digging bodies out of the snow in other parts of the country. Tomorrow I will get out and do a little gardening work, unless it rains. [Pause while praying for rain.]

We have a critter living in the walls of our house. It left calling cards in a bathroom closet, so we (that is, I) cleaned out the stuff that was stored on the floor of the closet and our exterminator put down two traps. We (that is, I) also put back in place the board that covers the opening where a plumber can access the bathtub fixtures. This morning, something was making a big racket inside the closet but it wasn't a critter stuck to the traps. The board was still in place. Whatever it was had to be bigger than your average mouse or rat to make so much noise trying to dislodge the board, like maybe a possum or a 'coon. I'm afraid I may have to get my father's old .380 automatic and shoot the beast. The last time he used it, he shot a pocket gopher that was tearing up his front yard. I'm not sure I want to use it inside the house, though. It will make a helluva mess. If I could rent an anaconda or a rat snake, I'd turn it loose inside the walls of the house but if I do that, I will be living alone.

Apparently it is part of a man's job description to deal with rodents, from trapping or poisoning them to removing their carcasses. Women don't do this. They may deliver babies but they don't exterminate rodents. That's an overgeneralization - old farm women may do it, and grizzled old Marine Corps sergeants of the female variety may do it, but not your average housewife.

Aaahh, Spring in Florida. Hurricane season is just around the corner. It doesn't get any better than this.