Birthday weekend

We stayed deliberately quiet here on the home front this past weekend, which of course marked the celebration of my 58th birthday. Honestly we were more celebrating the very good news that a strange bump on Mary's brother Rob's chest turns out to be not male breast cancer, which is a apparently a thing, if a very rare one. But not on Rob's body. It was some other wierd shit, but benign.

On Saturday I did as little as possible, which turned out to be quite little. I had told my neighbor Caroline that I would put together the electric mower that we had bought for our two households after years of borrowing their gas mower (and sometimes taking suboptimal care of it due to my personal idiocy). That 100% did not happen. 

The one thing I did do on Saturday was a second round of pollen remediation out on the screened in porch, in preparation for having the family (including Rob and Graham, Mom and Matt) over for my birthday feast of chinese food and coconut cake (from New Hope Market). I swept while listening to Bella White, then I even did some raking of the patio. On Sunday I went further and actually broke out our old vacuum cleaner (after asking Mary's permission) and vacuumed the porch. It didn't let me listen to music while working, but man was it gratifying. Shout out to Caroline Slade for the vacuum cleaner tip.

It turns out that a more or less usable screened in porch was the very best birthday present I could have given to myself. I had breakfast out there this morning and it was perfect.