The day started with Anne looking out the bedroom window at our array of bird feeders and then noticing the perfectly aligned pair of wheelbarrows, facing into the sunrise. “We could do a redneck Cialis commercial.” It would have made for great blog fodder, but fortunately, it was still too cold to be anything more than a joke. I couldn’t imagine us crawling into those grungy, old, dried cement encrusted wheelbarrows, in any state of dress, let alone undress.
The concrete guys finished their work today. The still drying concrete looks fine, but the rest of that section of the yard is a mess. I feel plaintiff’s remorse. Maybe I should have lawyered-up or at least asked for some punitive driveway replacement. I now understand one of the values of punitive damages. Actual damages never cover everything, so charging punitive damages covers what wasn’t originally comprehended. Still, I’ll probably just lump it and just carry on. my Mom would not be proud.

The other frost on the bloom was caused by Pippin, also-known-as the alpha predator, the cat from across the street. It was checking out Anne’s bird smorgasbord, when it spied us. It started running towards us and I tried scaring it off, but Anne the critic, complained that I only scared it on to the still drying concrete, all the while doing nothing to help. I suspect that she is a card-carrying member of the international cat conspiracy. We now have a few cat’s paw prints in our new concrete.

Dave is leaving tomorrow, but he will be back again next weekend. It is nice to have a child back in the Midwest again. I was speaking with him about one-sided political rants, like the one I made earlier this week about Missouri Primary politics. I made the statement that it was as one-sided as a Vanilla Ice 45. I saw the confusion on his face from this statement. He knew who Vanilla Ice was, because he appeared in one of the live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies that he had loved when he was little, “Ice, Ice Baby”. It turns out that the confusion came with the term, 45. I was not speaking of a Colt handgun, but an apparently hopelessly archaic music delivery system, the 45 rpm record, once the preeminent music delivery system. I explained all this to Dave and he divined, “Like a one hit wonder.” I always find that when you have to explain a joke, it loses all of its humor. This was no exception.