Ah.....another relaxing weekend at home....

Well, if you call mowing the lawn and weeding the jungle known as the flowerbeds at the front of my house relaxing, I guess it's relaxing. It was also about 90 degrees yesterday and about that already this morning. But things are shaping up!


I finally got the perennials planted today. The coreopsis look like hell, but that's what happens when they sit in a dark, hot garage for two weeks and I forget to water them. I don't know if they'll survive or not, but they've got a better chance outside than they did inside. I'll keep on watering them and find out. If they don't make it, that's ok too. I've got a sandwich baggie full of seeds from the plants in Urbana. Ditto for black-eyed Susan seed. The black-eyed Susan plants didn't make it. I don't know if the little oak tree will survive or not. On the other hand, I didn't think the raspberries were going to make it and nearly all the canes are putting out little leaves now. So maybe I'll just have to plant the little oak and see what happens.

For additional fun and games today, I really ought to get out the weed whacker and trim around the trees, fence and sides of my driveway. But it's hot and I'm tired. And before I can use the weed whacker I need to feed it more string. At the moment I really don't want to mess with it.

But here is what I have accomplished so far: moved dead poison ivy to the shady corner of the yard (still need to round-up the heck out of that corner to kill the rest of the poison ivy and if I thought I could use napalm without torching the neighbor's fence or my entire yard, I would), mowed the entire yard in about 2 hours, hacked down the weeds in the front flower beds, planted the iris, coreposis and chives from Urbana, started in on the oodles of laundry from last week and got the living room squared away for the most part. It doesn't seem like I've done much, but looking at the list it's obvious I haven't been slacking off completely either.

My conundrum:
I am running out of places to put things. All of my belongings are now in this house. I don't have anything in storage or hiding in the basement. It's all right here. On top of that, I don't have the built-in bookshelves that I had in Urbana AND I have all the books from when I was a kid here too. So even more books than before with less bookshelf space to put them on.

To solve this logistics problem, I think two things need to happen. I need to re-organize the garage so that I can put boxes out there for storage. I also need to put away/re-organize the guest bedroom so I can store stuff in there temporarily. Of course, I really don't feel like doing either of those things today. The garage is rather hot right now and my motivation for tacking the spare room has evaporated. But I know I need to keep moving on getting things squared away.

What I'll do today: Clean my bathroom, tidy up my room and finish putting away the clothes that are laying around waiting for me to fold them, put away more books in the office and living room and clean up the kitchen. I should be able to clear all the boxes out of my bedroom and kitchen today. I also need to bake oatmeal raisin cookies for work and for Mitch.

The job update:
I spent half of this week in Nashville doing advanced SAS data management training. It went quite well. It was a good mechanism for me to re-introduce my brain to SAS and for me to meet a bunch of the other epi folks in the state and county health departments. There were 9 of us in the class. Lots of folks had heard that I had started work and they were eager to meet me. I also got to meet the EIS officer assigned to Nashville. He put me in touch with the state medical entomologist and we may do some mosquito work together. Everybody seemed very nice and encouraged me to call them if I had questions or needed any assistance or data resources.

Next week I spend two days in Nashville again, but this time learning MS SQL. I'm going to that class with my boss. We're going to carpool over there. I'm hoping she's driving cuz I really don't know my way around at all. I ought to whip out a map and study up on the layout of where I-40 comes in to town and where things are in relationship to each other. I noticed last week that I really didn't have any sense of compass direction at all when I was downtown.

The drive to Nashville takes about 2 hours and is smooth sailing on the Interstate. Pretty scenery too. It'll be a gorgeous drive this fall once the leaves start to change color. Saw some rather unusual (to me) vehicles headed west on my way home.

The first was a rad waste transport. I don't know where it's headed because the major commercial low-level rad waste repository I know about is in SC. But it could have also been headed all the way to Yucca Mountain, NV, though I'd think they'd find a different way to ship it that far than putting it on a flatbed truck. There are a number of nuclear plants, plus Oak Ridge National Lab in TN, not to mention research facilities and hospitals and other places which would generate rad waste.


The second "unusual" vehicle was a landing craft. No telling where it was headed. Looks brand new to me. Wonder if it'll get an overseas trip in the next six months. In any event, someone in the military is getting a new toy.

I wonder what I'll see on the trip next week. :o)