We got up and went to church this morning, as we do most Sunday mornings. The twist was that I actually convinced Amanda to get up before me, thanks in part I think to the fact that less than an hour before I’d gotten up to let Bruce out to pee.

After church we grabbed some food from IHOP. The waitress was one we’ve had before. She always comes across as gruff and uncaring, but she actually did a decent job in spite of that today. When we finished breakfast we went to Target to get a few things then Lowe’s to pick up some flowers for where the azaleas used to be.

Lowe’s irritated me. I was pretty tired and, as I’m wont to do on Sundays, I wanted to take a nap at some point. So as Amanda was looking at flowers and shrubs and asking my opinion I was trying to stay awake. Then a Beatles song came on over the loudspeaker. I can’t remember which one it was now, but I remember a lady walking around near us was humming along to it. It perked me up, but they kept interrupting it with announcements about where help was needed. That was bad enough, but then about halfway through the song they inserted their own commercial over it. “Why,” I asked Amanda, “do they need to interrupt The Beatles to play their own commercial? We’re already here!”

But at least we didn’t get soaked at Lowe’s like we did yesterday.

It looked like it was going to rain today, but it didn’t. It actually turned out to be a nice day, although there was a cold wind blowing and the evening turned downright chilly. But the day itself was nice and I mowed the lawn for the first time in quote a while. Mowed the weeds is more like it. And a couple of plants out back under the pine tree that Amanda had told me yesterday to watch out for. It didn’t take her long to find that out.

I thought I was done after mowing, but Amanda decided she needed to go back to Lowe’s to pick up some more plants for the other side of walk where the azaleas were, and she’s right- we did need some. I was left home to finish plowing up that side and pull up a bunch of roots. Some of those roots were monsters, let me tell you. One of them that I had to eventually cut out was as thick as a small tree. It was fun stuff.

Eventually we finished for the day. I put my hammock back up (I took it down Friday in anticipation of rain) and rested in that for a few minutes then went inside where Amanda and I watched this past week’s Lost and a few other shows. Lost was a really good one, showing the connection between Sawyer and Locke. Locke’s dad was the conman who conned Sawyer’s parents out of a bunch of money and slept with his mom, leading his dad to commit a murder-suicide. It’s also who Sawyer got his name from. They also hinted that the island was an afterlife of sorts. I think that’s a curveball, because it’s an explanation that a lot of people (myself included) pondered very early on in the show.

Zach Dotsey