blog.Adonis.net

Summer is officially here. I just came back into the house after completing what’s become a summer ritual around here: rounding up the first batch of ripe plums from the tree in the backyard and getting them all washed and ready to be brought into the office tomorrow.

That tree is one of the reasons I decided I wanted to buy my house. They are, with no exaggeration, the best plums ever grown. If the offer on this place hadn’t been accepted, I was fully prepared to sneak back in the middle of the night with a U-Haul to steal the tree.

So, now that the time has arrived, I will be climbing the hill in the backyard every night when I get home for the next couple weeks or so collecting the ripest ones before they fall off. They’re so good, I’m sure that for every one that falls from the tree and doesn’t get eaten, a baby angel has its wings ripped out of their sockets.

Forgive my silence recently. I’ve been a busy guy, between work, my mom being in town for a couple weekends, and various other stuff that’s been keeping me away from this place (among others).

You’d think after all this time away I’d have something particularly witty or insightful to say, but it’s still early here, and my brain’s not due to kick in for at least another hour. The mental transmission’s also been jammed in “annoyed” since last night.

It’s a small thing, really. I’ve got a guy who shows up once a week and mows the lawn. He doesn’t do much else; it’s a pretty cushy gig for him, really. He could probably even skip the mowing every couple weeks and I’d never notice. This last week, though, he showed up, mowed the lawn, and then hacked up one of my boysenberry bushes before heading out. Why? I have no idea. He left the weeds next to the bush alone — he just mowed, hacked off everything that was going to become next year’s berry crop, and took off.

It’s not so much the butchery and the fact that it took me years to get to my first crop of berries this summer, and that I’ll now have a lot less next year, that has me ticked off. It’s that I can’t wrap my head around why he did it. The guy doesn’t trim bushes, ever. I’ve told him not to touch the berries before. Still, he felt the need to chop up the only thing in the backyard that I could possibly get worked up over.

I suppose I should be glad that the things I have to be upset over are so small, but that’s not going to stop me from making sure I’ve rehearsed every Spanish insult I know before he shows up next week.