I never went to bed last night.  That is, I fell asleep watching TV.  At some point I thought about going upstairs, but I rationed that if I turned the TV off Bruce would hear it and get up to go pee outside.  He does that every night- when he hears the cable box and TV click off he knows it’s time to go out and pee.  Either that, or when I moved he’d get up to go out, and since I didn’t want to wait for him while he peed, I just stayed on the couch.

I did go to bed after Amanda came downstairs to ask why I never came to bed though, for what that was worth.

After work today Amanda and I worked out in the yard a bit.  She had stopped by Lowe’s to pick up some plants.  Actually, she stopped to pick up another of some bushy thing with blue flowers that she’d picked up last week, but she decided to get a few extra things while she was there.

So she was out in the backyard planting some stuff, mostly in the bricked-in flower bed right outside the kitchen, and while she was doing that she figured she’d give the scraggly azaleas back there an extreme pruning.  I’d started the fire back up to burn some of the stuff we’d thrown on the burn pile a few weeks ago, so while she was pruning I decided to go ahead and throw her clippings on that.  Then, since that area was cleared out, I decided to rake up a couple years’ worth of leaves.  Actually there wasn’t that much, but it did need some clearing out.

Often once I get started on something I like to keep going, so I decided to rake out the corner of the yard where I have the hammock.  And that’s how we ended up with a night of weekday yard work.  Amanda kept planting stuff and I raked a bunch of leaves.

By the time it was finished it was nearly 8:00, which I didn’t realize.  We took showers then Amanda made herself a sandwich and I made a grilled cheese.  By this time it was a little after 8:00 so we watched American Idol.  Being down to three contestants they each sang three songs.  One was picked by a judge, one by the producers and one by the contestants themselves.  It was a pretty good night, I’d say.  Blake was outsung I think, but he was a better performer than Melinda or Jordin.  My prediction is Melinda and one of the other two for the final round.  I’m kind of leaning towards Jordin, although I think that would make the final night of singing a little boring.

After Amanda went to bed I watched Robin Hood then thought about playing Gears of War but opted to play Crackdown instead.  Michael, my live-in brother-in-law who is currently back at his parents’ house, joined me.  We putzed around on that for a while then he dropped off.  I decided to buy some additional content for the game and played with that for a while.

Zach Dotsey