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I got to play with mud again tonight. When I got home from work this evening I dashed in, changed into an old t-shirt and the shorts that really should be thrown away but haven’t been yet for just this reason, and dashed back out to the car to zip over to the church. This week is Blitz the Bricks week there, in an attempt to make a bit more headway in the Never-Ending Remodeling Project. Last time we did this it was a Saturday morning, and it was hot. It was hot today, but by the time I arrived, there was a breeze blowing and there was enough shade that it wasn’t too bad outside at all. I inhaled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the food cart and then was set to work on the trim for the top part of the walkway. I didn’t even bother with gloves this time – I just used the trowel to glop wads of mortar onto the bricks and then slapped the rest on by hand, mashing more goop into the cracks and crevices. Because the trim is so near to the ground, my little piece of construction fun involved an awful lot of bending over and then standing back up. I discovered that it went a lot faster if I got the bricks wet first (because dry bricks tend to suck moisture out of mortar extremely fast, making the goop-smooshing a bit more difficult). I also discovered that that my back does not appreciate a lot of bending over, and that mortar really dries out your hands. Richard showed up later because he had to make a detour into Sacramento. Saturday afternoon we bought a new cat tree, but it wouldn’t fit into his car, no matter how much shoving and maneuvering and muttering we did. So we wheedled truck-owning friends into picking it up for us, but we had to wait til this evening. He met them in Sacramento, followed them back to our house, unloaded the tree into the living room (where it was apparently quite promptly swarmed with several curious felines), and then made it over to the church just in time for the food break, where we all discovered that mortar dust adds an interesting flavor to chocolate cream pie. ******** Sunday evening we decided to head into Old Sacramento for dinner and some aimless wandering. We parked right next to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory outlet, which I determined was a sign that we needed to get chocolate Right Now, and then – chocolate in hand – we meandered around the streets and peered into windows and bemoaned the fact that most of the stores had already closed. But there were enough places open to do some actual in-store browsing, including one store that has an extremely large and diverse selection of items ranging from costumes to gargoyles to all the trappings required by anyone who plans to throw a hula party. And it is there that we found four more devil duckies – a yellow one, a black one, and a boxed set of red, green, and blue. We already had the red one, having found that much earlier (along with the glow-in-the-dark devil duck as well), and at first we pondered the wisdom of having two of the same color. Luckily we determined that the new (and duplicate) red devil ducky would make a lovely birthday present for a friend, because no bath is complete without at least one evil rubber duck bobbing merrily around in the water. Richard lined up all the rubber ducks on the edge of the bathtub, with the ‘normal’ yellow ducky in the middle. My personal feeling is that the ‘normal’ one is starting to look ever so slightly nervous, surrounded as it is by a veritable rainbow of larger rubber ducks, all with little horns on their heads and maniacal grins on their little beaks. Richard, however, insists that the ‘normal’ duck is actually the ringleader, and that all the devil ducks are merely lowly peons forced to do its evil bidding. But then this is from the same man who insists that Azzie – the fuzzy black puffball cat whose reaction to anything is to flop on his side, his eyes extra-wide, and cute at you for all he is worth – is evil (we’re talking about a cat who, if human, would be the perfect poster child for the Bimbo Society of America here) and, worse yet, bent on world domination. And he thinks *I’m* odd…
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