From the back porch - 7/16/17

If someone had told me yesterday morning how tired I would be come nightfall, I might have just turned around and gone back to bed.

The first couple hours of the day proceeded as usual.  I got up, drank some coffee, cooked breakfast.  Around 10 a.m., The Grandson called, wanting to come over for the weekend.  No biggie; he's a good kid; we like him. 

Shortly after his dad brought him over, I started thinking about school starting soon, and how all of the grandchildren would be needing school supplies.  I got online, found all of the lists (high school, 7th grade, 5th grade, 2nd grade), and The Grandson and I headed to town to get the things on the lists.

Now, it's been a while since I've dealt with this sort of thing, and I was a bit shocked by the extent of these school supply lists.  When I was in school, if you had a three-ring notebook full of paper and a #2 pencil, you were good to go.  But these lists...!  Dry erase markers.  Spiral notebooks for every subject.  Composition notebooks.  Whole boxes of pencils.  Folders, with prongs and without.  Page protectors.  Glue sticks.  Highlighters.  School boxes.  Pencil pouches with metal rings and clear fronts.  Two of this, five of that.  Geez!  My shopping cart ranneth over, $200 worth of pencils, papers, and markers!

On the way home, The Grandson and I whipped through a hot-&-ready pizza joint.  When we got home, The Husband was on the back porch, sizing up the door frame for the new, snake-proof door we'd bought last weekend.  The first thing he said was, "I think it's the wrong size."  The opening is 36" wide.  We'd bought a 32" door, which came with a metal frame, part of which is welded onto the door, itself.  The hardware store man said it was perfect, if we'd also install something called a "brick ledge" that was supposed to create the right size frame on which to install the metal door.  It wasn't happening.  We tried adding lumber to the frame, but nothing we did made it okay.  And even if we had installed the door, there was a 1/2" crack between the welded-on door frame and the actual door.  Why, a big python could squeeze through that!  We decided to return the door to the store and get a regular 36" screen door.  Getting the metal door back into the packaging it came in was an ordeal by itself.  (Bear in mind that it was humid and about 167 degrees outside.)  We were both drenched with sweat by the time we loaded the metal door into the truck.

Since early spring, my to-do list has included washing off the back porch and water-sealing the wood.  We bought the water seal last summer but never applied it (the instructions said to wait a while to seal treated lumber).  In my mind, this is the year to do it, especially since the recent snake slaughter had left bad voodoo snake blood stains on the floor.  So while The Husband went to return the door, I started moving the furniture off the back porch so that I could clean the floor and the rails.  This porch is 16' x 20', and FULL of furniture and loads of crap that shouldn't even be out here.  Unloading it took a while.  The high-powered nozzle that fits on the end of the water hose did a great job of taking out the dust, pollen, and spider webs, but there were dark, moldy spots that would only come off with a scrub brush.  Once the wood was clean, I turned to the furniture, itself, to remove the spider webs and dust bunnies from under the tables and chairs.  Then it all had to be moved back to the porch.

I'd just about finished the porch when The Husband came back with the new door.  Soon after that, The 3 Granddaughters arrived, tired and hungry and wet from an afternoon of swimming.  (Their parents had come over to help install the new door.)  Since they were here, it seemed practical to sort out the mountain of school supplies in my living room and send them home with the children.  We all sat down amongst the pile and called off the items on everyone's list.  To my disappointment, I'd bought the wrong kind of notebooks and not enough crayons and markers.  *sigh* 

8 p.m. - The girls have gone home.  The Husband and I are exhausted and hungry, and we stink, and there's nothing in the house to eat that doesn't require serious cooking.  When I floated the idea of fast-food burgers, The Husband and The Grandson seconded and thirded the motion.  The Grandson and I went to town and got them at the drive-thru window (I was still way too stinky to go inside).  We gobbled them down the minute we got home.

9:30 p.m. - I'm finally clean.  But I am done - D-O-N-E done, I tell you - for the day.  It took me about an hour to rest up enough to go to bed.

I think today will be a lazy day.  There's still some work to be done on the back porch - tools need to be put away, and a little more straightening-up is in order.  But it's still hot and humid, and there's a movie that The Grandson wants to see.  An afternoon in a cool movie theatre sounds just right.