Sunday Decrapification Update

See? I know what should be going on in the blog, even if I haven't had much time to write this summer.

Unfortunately, the state of the crap is that it has multiplied. Or at least, the crap has shifted around enough so that it looks like it has multiplied. It's far too depressing to post pictures, so I'll just try to explain.

Last Saturday, two young women of my acquaintance celebrated becoming B'not Mitzvah (that's sort of the plural of Bat Mitzvah) in my back yard. And from that simple occasion, all kinds of things sprang. For one thing, we had to make the house look reasonably presentable. For another, we kind of needed to make the back yard accessible and not dangerous to young children. And for a third, we thought there were going to be around 50 or 60 people here who would want to eat.

The food was the simple part. The bags of cookies pictured in the last blog post were but a small part of the food preparation that went on for three weeks. If 50 to 60 people had shown up, we would have been in good shape. Instead, we had about half that number and lots of leftovers. I suppose that's better than running out of food, all things considered.

Making the house presentable was probably the second-easiest part. The slave labor and our sort-of kind-of foster slave daughter slaved away and things looked pretty good. Whatever we couldn't find an immediate place for, we just shoved in the garage or the master bedroom. (Told you that pictures would be too depressing!) Now it's time to clear everything out again and figure out where it should go.

That means, of course, that making the back yard look presentable for a crowd was the hard part. We actually thought we had the yard under control until the last week before the B'not Mitzvah. We had pulled weeds, planted things, removed obnoxious plants, and more.

Then we had three straight days of rain. In the desert, such as we have here in Dodge, rain means that all kinds of seeds and plants that have been lying dormant for years suddenly have a chance to explode all over the landscape. Despite all the thousands of puncture vine plants that Sports Nut and I have gotten rid of over the past three years, there are thousands more springing up in the yard as I type. (Really. Yet again, it is raining in Dodge.)

We reached a temporary detente with the weeds and managed to have a lovely Shabbat service last week. Now we have just completed an entire week of taking it easy. Tomorrow it will be time to start pulling weeds and clearing out the crap. Again.