HONEY?

Honey?

You said to bang on the roof when I was done cleaning the gutters and you'd steady the ladder while I climbed down. So I'm done, and I'm banging.

Honey?

Sure is windy up here today. Gutters look sweet, though. She must be watching the game.

Honey?

THAT PILE OF MULCH CAN DO WHAT?!

So today yours truly was attacking the massive pile of mulch I created last month, spreading it about on some of the recently-cleared stretches of low-lying ground, when...is that smoke?

Turned out it wasn't, or whatever it was stopped doing whatever it was that made whatever it is look like smoke - but apparently, large mulch piles can indeed catch fire...

The wood chips that comprise mulch break down anabolically, much the way compost does, said Jim Taylor, owner of Taylor Recycling in Montgomery, who learned the hard way that mulch can be a menace in big piles. Though the pile sizes at his place conformed to state fire codes, he said, the codes were outdated and didn't allow for what could happen to fine-grind mulch. He estimated that of the eight or so fire calls he had to make – along what he called a painful learning curve – half of them were the results of spontaneous combustion.

Awesome! Continuing...

Hosing down a big pile of mulch might actually increase chances of combustion, he said, since water increases the anabolic breakdown.

And that's great, too! I think the writer meant to use anaerobic (as in this piece), but still. That large mulch pile is now a much smaller, non-critical-mass mulch pile.

WHAT DAY IS IT AGAIN?

Six days out of the last seven there's been somebody here whose stomach has been in open rebellion - starting with Beast, then Noodle, then yours truly. The schedule? Blown to smithereens. But the floors are looking lovely, seeing as there wasn't a spot in the house that wasn't within the blast radius of somebody's gastric eruption this week. We went through a load of paper towels and Lysol wipes, but now the mopping can be procrastinated upon for an extra week seeing as we scrubbed the bejesus out of the place this week.

The good thing about lying on the bathroom floor in a nauseous haze is that there's plenty of time to inspect the infrastructure while waiting for the inevitable call on the big white phone from Earl in his Buick. For instance, the caulking by the base of the tub needs re-doing, and I also found an essential missing part from one of Noodle's bath toys.

A toy we threw out two years ago, but still.

Me, I'm still fuzzy clammy wobbly from the bug. You can tell me by the way I walk.