Minutiae

Last week I did a survey for a marketing company. They paid me $75 for an hour of listening to my opinions. I'm not allowed to discuss the contents of the survey. I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

I took some of the $75 and bought new casual shoes last week. They are brown. I like them a lot. They remind me of shoes I saw in Europe. They are replacing my hiking boots I used to wear on Fridays to work. Somehow, in the last few months my hiking boots have gotten covered in paint.

I desperately need a hair cut. I started growing a beard awhile back and now my whole head looks round. My daughter and I are still fighting over whether or not I have a beard. I maintain that I have a beard. She thinks that I still just have whiskers.

We still have bats in our office walls. Every night around ten o'clock they wake up and I can hear them crawling in the walls. I don't understand how something so small can hibernate all winter and live. I caulked where I thought they were getting in. If I caulked them in, they're going to die and smell.

After being exhausted from our roof project, and swearing I was going to relax for awhile, I've already started planning and building an attic hatch door.

There are 40 days between now and the end of the year. Of those, 12 are weekends. I get 4.5 days off from holidays. I also have 8.5 days of vacation to use up. That means I only have to work 15 more days this year.

I estimate that the size of our compost pile is about 125 cubic feet (ten foot diameter and four feet high). I'd like to spread it onto our lawn to even out the bumpy bits and to provide more organic matter to the grass. I have no idea what's at the bottom of it as we inherited it. I'm a little bit afraid of what I'll find at the bottom.

Our current dining room chairs we got for free on Craig's List. I'm always afraid I'm going to break one. We didn't have a dining room set and we don't want to spend the money on a nice one until the girls are a bit older.

After hearing stories of our house and me roughly describing where it is, a coworker spent one afternoon driving around until he found it. I tease him about stalking me.

I have two four foot by four foot pallets of shingles outside of our garage right now. I hate looking at them. It looks messy, but there is no room in our garage for them.

For her birthday, my wife asked to be able to park her car in the garage. Its a three stall garage and there still isn't room for a car.

Some days I sit on the little bench in our front yard and look at our house and smile. Some days I wish one of the big oak trees in our backyard would fall on it.

The first time I saw a picture of our house online, I thought it looked like an old schoolhouse.

Whenever I trim the Tartarian Honeysuckle hedge, I think it smells like cucumbers.

One day when I was in the backyard, the neighbor's cleaning lady started talking to me. She is an older woman who told me all about the days when our house and the neighbor's house were owned by the original family. She also told me that when she was a teenager, she and a boy snuck into the shed that she was currently cleaning. She said that it was the first place she had sex. I changed the subject.

Early in the year, I asked the magic eight ball at work if I would regret replacing the roof. It replied, "It is certain". The next day I asked it if I should replace the roof. It replied, "Without a doubt". The magic eight ball at work hates me.