NO DEAD PETS ALLOWED

I have to take the boy to daycare today, so this should be short.

"Should be" the key words here...

And I'm talking about the boy who fell sound asleep at 8:30 last night after his little ass got some SERIOUS exercise.

When Mama brought him home, Daddy was in the front yard raking leaves. So the boy got to help Daddy rake leaves which amounted to stealing the rake and toddling around the yard with it.

Then we all went to H&R Block to get our tax returns filed. This gave the boy ample opportunity to play "Where's Baby?" over and over again as he hid behind desks and file cabinets and came bounding out into the open area, laughing his baby head off.

Then to our new storage unit, a 10 by 30' unit that gave him more than enough room to run up and down the length of it several times until his eyes began to droop, which could have been from the rat poison traps we had set, but we chalked up to impending sleepiness.

Sure enough, he got home, ate half a ravioli and fell asleep in his high chair.

Thus, waking up at 4 a.m., coming to bed with us and proceeding to play, play, play with Daddy's whiskers and hands and hair until he passed out at 5:25 a.m.

Wow...just in time for me to get up.

Thanks boy!!

I busted my ass yesterday on this house, getting ready for tomorrow night when the real estate agent comes by and depresses us with all the news of what has to be done to our home.

First, I went and rented a storage unit which you read about above. The lady I rented it from was about as redneck as they come. A nice woman, but just...rednecky. Managers of storage facilities tend to live there on site for some reason, and she lived in a room behind the office. With a bunch of birds in there who wouldn't stop chirping.

"Them's mah birds," she said proudly, as if I thought all that chirping was being done by a wolf or something.

"Birds are nice," I said, not really knowing what else to add to the conversation.

"Yep," she agreed. "Ah live here on site."

"What a lovely place," I said, admiring the cinder block walls and wall clock with Jesus in the middle, pointing out the time.

She gave me the rundown on everything that's expected of me as a tenant. Which really wasn't a whole lot and mostly concerned the prompt payment on the first of each month of $108. Other than that, it seemed to be a fairly casual atmosphere.

"You got any questions for me," she drawled.

Oh. I had plenty.

But I stuck with one.

"So can I run drugs out of this place or what?" I asked.

She laughed and then told me a ten minute story of the time she was managing a storage facility in Florida and some guy was running drugs out of his storage unit and the cops were watching him and they busted him one day. She kept saying "To make a long story short..." but that would only make the story longer. I lost interest a quarter of the way through the story and started managing my time in my head better.

She told me I couldn't run drugs and I couldn't store pets in there either.

"What if the pets are dead?" I asked. "I think a dead dog or two would be okay...right?"

No dead dogs in the storage units.

Finally, she gave me the security code to get in the place. I went to try it and it didn't work.

I had to buzz her and she had to walk SLOWLY to the gate to find out that there was something wrong with the code. So she gave me her own personal code which she shouldn't have done and whatever I do, I shouldn't share it with anyone else.

531#1467*

Just...you know...don't spread that code around...

I loaded up every box in this house that had crap in it and took it over there and it eats up maybe an eighth of the space that we have in there which is cool. In case we were to sell this house before our house is finished being built, we have a place where we can store a lot of our stuff while we move into an apartment.

Once I got all the boxes loaded up, I switched gears to yard work.

I eated weeds.

I trimmed bushes.

I vacuumed driveways and sidewalks.

I raked leaves.

I cleaned and scoured the back patio.

It doesn't sound like much, but man...am I sore today.

But my yard looks GOOD, baby.

Yard of the month??

Shit.

Yard of the YEAR, FOOL!!!

I closed the day by cleaning up my computer room. Clutter's gone ... everything else is in its place.

Tonight...more last minute work. Tomorrow Susie's actually taking the day off and doing last minute details to the house like mopping and dusting a few rooms.

We might actually sell this house after all.

"Might".

Oh...

Like you care...but Hyundai is building an automotive facility here in town which is something that our state has been trying to land for the last year.

This usually wouldn't really affect me, but someone told me something the other day that I hope is true.

They said if we DID get the Hyundai plant, people are going to be moving to town.

People who will need homes to move into.

Homes like mine.

Wheeee!!

God.

I'm a nervous wreck about this home selling thing.

Alright, that's enough...gotta go wake the wife and boy up, get their butts in gear and go back to work for the first time in 11 days.

I've got a ton of writing to do from now until eternity.

So I've gotta pace myself.

Which means...peace out.