I woke up just before 9:00 today, so it ended up being one of those days where I didn’t get a shower until a bit later. I haven’t done that in a long time, and it’s odd that it happened today because I got a good seven hours of sleep, which is generally plenty for me. Work itself wasn’t as frantic today as it has been, but I spent a lot of time following up with people on the phone and talking to our designers about various things. I’d been trying to head out the door to get to Dineen Animal Hospital and exchange one type of medicine for another but I kept getting distracted. Around 2:30 I was telling this to my boss, Scott Hendrix, while having another conversation with Catalin, one of our programmers. Scott finally told me to just go ahead and go!

I forgot to mention that I sent off our first mortgage payment today. Actually, as I was going outside to send it I watched the mail truck drive down the other side of the road, meaning he’d already come by our house. So the mortgage check is going out tomorrow, but still, I wrote it and sealed it in an envelope.

In the mail I found a transcript of the deposition I went to for a client a few weeks ago. I had to sign off on the fact that it was error free and send it back to one of the attorneys. It was actually a fun little read. Scott was in his deposition for about four hours, so I can’t imagine what a pain it was to go through his.

I ended up working until nearly 7:00 tonight, mainly because I had been so busy during the day following up on existing projects that I had let the support aspect of my job slip. After that Amanda and I went to Wal-Mart and mostly got some food. We picked up after that and did other odd things around the house in expectation of the arrival of Ben and Amy (formerly Brower) Farmer. They got here from Raleigh somewhere between ten and eleven and we stayed up talking for a few hours about weddings and kids and houses and finances and cruises and cars, all sorts of stuff. In fact, Amanda and Amy are in our bedroom right now talking about something or other.

I’m getting pretty tired, so I may have to run them off soon.

I downloaded a Google Adsense plugin for WordPress. I don’t expect to make much since I don’t get a crap-ton of traffic, but if I earn a few extra bucks off it, hey, not a bad thing, right?

I was mowing the lawn tonight and got the back done. I lowered the blades in light of advice for and against doing so, and am glad I did. Last time I barely made an impact on some of the weeds growing in with the grass. I really don’t think it’s cutting it too low and Earl Lemons, my grandpa-in-law, said with the type of grass growing here it might be a good thing to cut it low. It felt good, smelling the freshly mowed grass and knowing it was my own yard’s fragrance.  Yard Fragrance might be an okay band name.  Needs tweaking, unless maybe it’s a country group, or maybe an alt-country group.
I moved to the front and saw that our neighbor from across the street, Chris, had some over with his lab and Rottie. They were extremely friendly. Amanda came out to talk too nd then I went to get Bruce. Chris let his dogs say hello to him one at a time and let the lab go first (he had them on leashes) and the Rottweiler was just going crazy jumping in the air and spinning incircles in anticipation of getting to greet Bruce.

We went over to look at the kittens they were holding in their house that were dropped off at the vet where Chris’s wife (whose name eludes me at the moment, dammit) works. They started out with 14, five got pneumonia and died, five are spoken for and four are left. This one that was real scraggly looking came over and sat on my lap and started purring loudly. His name is Tater, but I called him Tweak after the character on South Park. Before long I had four or five of them crawling on me. The Rottweiler, whose name also eludes me, came and plopped right down on my lap too. She partially sat on Tater-Tweak in the process, but he was fine.

We left there after a little bit when the Rottie was able to push open the door and ran down the street a little to greet people who were over at Bonnie and Dave’s, next door to Chris. We helped track her down then went back over to our place to finish cleaning up a little. Amanda put polyurethane on the washer and dryer closet doors.

She also called her parents’ house to tell her brother, Michael Mercer, about the kittens (they’re only a few weeks old, by the way, so they’re still really tiny). Her mom answered and was apparently in some sort of mood because she kept on Amanda about not letting Michael get a cat. Her worry, and I understand, is about Michael’s financial situation and the burden a cat can create. Amanda kept telling her to take it up with Michael and I think she was a little amused at how much her mom kept on about it. Anyway, Amanda told her mom that we’d already told Michael we didn’t care if he got one and that she wasn’t going to tell him he couldnt have one, that she should take it up with Michael and not her. I was entertained listening to the conversation.

That’s about it for today, and I wasn’t very chronological about it. Oh, I did realize while shutting the office door so the girls could have their talking time t hat there’s a hook on the back of this door. I’m not sure I ever noticed that before, since we generally keep the door open so Mr. Cobblepott can come do his business when he needs to.

Time to kick those ladies out of my bedroom. Never thought I’d say that. And they just came in to look at the website of the guy who did Amy and Ben’s pictures when they got married in Hawaii. Nighty night time.

Zach Dotsey