To the office

Must prep and head out to the office shortly, despite Natalie's leaving for the north on Wednesday, though I'll try to hustle home early to help finish our last puzzle of the Christmas season and make a fire with the wood I hauled up on the porch yesterday in advance of the rain coming in tomorrow.

I had a good hour in the backyard yesterday, flipping the long-neglected compost pile, moving wood, getting Natalie's bike out of the basement so she can throw it in the back of the Subaru and take it to Connecticut. I also hustled down to the dam and pulled weeds off of it and treated the small number of plants on it with a de minimis amount of Roundup, to which Mary objects but which our inspecting engineer has told me I must use to kill the actual plants and their root systems burrowing into the dam, rather than just superficially remove the visible part. It is worth a little spousal evil eye for a dam classed by NC's Department of Environmental Quality as "High Hazard," meaning a breach would likely lead to death downstream.

Later I tried to walk to Walgreens while talking to Leslie on the phone, only to discover halfway there that I had forgotten a mask. Sigh. So I went home and drove.