Mind tripping

I feel … frustrated. It’s Monday, March 28—my birthday, 43rd to be precise—and I feel like I missed the whole weekend. I didn’t, by the way. I barely thought about this job. It’s just that all last week, I watched the weather in anticipation of the weekend. “Sixty-one degrees on Sunday,” accuweather.com lied. The wind blew like Aeolus, and instead of the warm-but-brisk Saturday morning—well words are failing me.

People who’ve been reading this column for the last few years know I’m a fool for the yard and garden. When people look in my eyes and talk about, you know, journalism stuff, they must know occasionally I’ve shut the door, run downstairs and grabbed my garden fork. Sometimes, when I’m deep into the relative placement of Swiss chard and string beans, I’ll have to apologize at the end of long, uncomfortable silences, “Sorry, I went away for a second.”

So after a week of uncomfortable silences and constant craving, I was neither able to plant my spinach nor re-arrange my garden’s sprinkling system (three zones each with three, individually adjustable sprinkler heads). Yeah, I half-heartedly pulled some grass that had the temerity to sprout in my walkway, and I built a shelf for container plants on a patio I’ve been working on, and yeah, I reconstructed a fence and did my taxes and watched some TV and designed a steel fence; I still feel as though I didn’t get anything accomplished this weekend.

I know there are a lot of you out there who feel the same way I do. We love the four seasons, but only because winter means the seed catalogs are going to start arriving. And I saw the first day of spring more than a week ago.

You should see my fingernails, not a hangnail or a black line on any of them. And you know what they say, idle hands are the devil’s playthings. Have a happy April Fools’ Day.