Adventures of a Seattle Dad

Recently I had a yard implement catch 22. I wanted a chipper to take care of yard waste, but my shed is full, so I needed another shed. The problem was that I needed to use the chipper to clear space to put the shed so I could store the chipper. I looked at Costco and Home Depot and chose a plastic, put together yourself shed. How hard can it be to put together a plastic shed? Let's start with the purchase. There is a row of sheds in the parking lot at The Home Depot. I want to buy one just like this one. No clerks in sight. I go into the garden area and ask for a shed. The clerk asks for the stock number. There is no stock number on the shed. I point to it and say that one, the one on the end. She pages a helper. Time passes. She pages again. And again. And Again. After 6 pages someone wanders up, slowly, and asks if someone needs help. Yes, I need a shed - just like that one. The helper goes to see if they have one. Fifteen minutes later he comes out with several boxes. He has

It seems like I take an unbelievable amount of yard waste out of my yard. It's not that I am some kind of gardening fanatic. I don't have a picture perfect yard, and as a single parent I am not blessed with tons of free time to care for everything. Stuff just grows like crazy. I should explain about my yard. It is a pie shaped, quarter acre. The back yard is the wide part of the pie and is about 70 feet across. The former owners were friends with someone who was going through a divorce. Out of spite, this friend took all of the landscaping in the settlement, even though she had no yard in which to put everything. The former owners took many of these plants and planted them all over the place. Combine way too many plants, 9 months of rain per year, and my somewhat Darwinistic view of my yard, and you have a recipe for a jungle. I have a 90 gallon yard waste container which takes no time at all to fill. That gets picked up every other week. Several times a year I have to load

Alex and I had a great weekend this weekend. When I went back to Kansas for my Dad's funeral a couple of weeks ago, I picked up all of my Matchbox cars that I had when I was a kid. My sister was kind enough to ship them out to me because there were too many to bring on the plane. Alexander's great-grandpa is into everything to do with cars which includes toy cars, so he asked to see them. Alex and I went over Saturday afternoon and had fun looking at all of the cars with his great-grandpa. He brought out some of his toy cars, too. All of us had fun playing with the cars even if our combined ages are over 120. Some things never get old. On Sunday we drove the fire truck in to Seattle to the Pacific Science Center to see U23D in IMAX. The old firetruck doesn't get a lot of us in the winter so I thought that it needed to go for a nice drive. We used almost a half a tank of gas to drive into Seattle and back - the same trip would not have even moved the fuel gauge on the VW

We share our house with 2 cats. We don't own them because a) they are cats, and b) they have a cat door so they could just leave any time they wanted. We adopted both of these cats - one from Craigslist, and one we found injured in the backyard. The Craigslist cat is named Gracie because her former owner didn't think that she was very graceful. She is orange and white, fat from lack of exercize in her former owner's tiny appartment, and not what one could call stealthy. She kinds of crashes through the underbrush when she is outside, and her coloration makes her visible from a block away. She is also very chatty. She starts talking from the moment that she comes in the cat door. Meow, meow, meow. Gracie is a neat freak, and her fur is always perfectly clean and soft. She is also very proper. She doesn't think that it is good manors to just jump on people, she does not care for snow at all, and sits with her paws crossed in a very lady-like way. Our other cat is George