I'm a workin' sumbitch...

I'm a workin' sumbitch...

I think I have worked more today than I do during a non-vacation day.

First, I spent an hour tidying up Casa de Big Stupid Tommy, which was apparently fell victim to some manner of paranormal activity concerning a demon who had issues with Chili Cheese Fritos. (Parenthetically, I like the idea of watching a camera set up of myself, walking into my living room in a sleep-walk trance, and simply scattering a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos willy nilly around my living room.

In truth, I simply dropped three or four Fritos when I was snacking on them while finishing up the World Series last night, and inadvertantly crunched them into the carpet. A device that men call "vacuum cleaner," that I refer to simply as "the vacuum" corrected this particular malady.

There was also the chore of "picking up the laundry," which seems to be vexsome for yours, truly. I own more hampers, at this point, than I have cars in my life. Yet somehow, everything I wear or use gets tossed onto the floor, as if my subconscious is sure there's a laundry fairy out there who will come pick up my clothes.

Trust me, after living on my own this long, I'm pretty sure they're not coming. And, as an aside, it's a pain in the ass not to have somebody else there to blame this shit on. It's always my dumb ass who's left the laundry on the floor, not done the dishes or drank the last ever-loving Guinness. That last one almost earned me an ass-whupping night before last.

But I digress.

After the cleaning, I spent an hour or so raking leaves up at my folks' house. There are roughly 600 trees on their property, and apparently they've all decided to start dropping their leaves this week. This has happened in years past. I suspect terrorists.

I want to take a second (my blog, fuckers...I'll take a paragraph or three), to address an issue of semantics. There are devices called "leaf-blowers." They are wondrous machines. They create a wind gust that allows you to be able to move leaves without the horror of picking up a rake. Here it is, though, that we run headlong into the semantic issue I brought up. There is nothing on the device that denotes it is expressly for the purpose of moving leaves. I think of the thing simply as a "blower." And as such, the dogs, the cats, a squirrel, an unfortunate chipmunk and my Dad all managed to feel my wrath.

It occurs to me know that there are jokes to be made along the lines of how I blew the dog, the cats and my Dad. These are to be kept silently to yourselves, to be shared perhaps after my funeral. Be warned, my funeral might come after I am executed, for killing you for telling jokes like "Tommy blew the dog."

Anyway, it should suffice to say that I lost the semantic argument, and was relegated to "rake duty."

There were other chores....

My folks are preparing to have major work done on their garage. Call it an exercise in persistent gravity, and result of living on a hill high enough to defend against the masses. But, the hill is doing its damnedest to push their garage down. And, after several years, it finally seems to be doing the trick. There will be some construction work, and it's involved my having to remove ductwork for a furnace made obsolete by prior renovation. This among other tasks, of course. At the end of the day, it's involved multiple trips to the metal salvage yard, here locally. I've made friends with the fine people at Seaton's, and highly recommend them should you have large quantities of metal to dispose of, or if you simply want to drive your truck through the swamp where Mateyo has his horse drown in The Neverending Story.

And? We cut up trees with chainsaws. We've had a damnable amount of stormy weather in 2009. And it's been simply a metric assload of limbs they've piled up for a free afternoon. So, there was chainsawing. We chainsawed the hell out of various trees and limbs. We chainsawed the shit out of this one tree. It was all, like, "Don't you dare chainsaw me, you asshole!" and I was all "Here I come anyway, you dumbass tree. I'm gonna chainsaw your ass!"

That's right. You can guess who won that particular fight.

Don't see any trees from my parents' yard blogging, do you?

Or do you? If so, send me the link. I need to know what I'm competing against.

Then, there was a return to Casa de Big Stupid Tommy, where showering was the order of the day. I spare you the hot, hot details. However, I did find sawdust in one particularly troublesome spot, and simply say that the sleepwalking featured early in this post may not be so much a figment of my overactive imagination, after all.

Anyway. We wrap up the vacation this weekend. There's a trip to Nashville in the works, and a hockey game to be taken in.

Good gravy. What a day....