That’s how I feel…all kinda grumbly and grouching.  I know the last thing I promised to put up here was the trip to the Winery for dinner with Carmen, Danielle, and Sylvia, but as usual, I lost my focus and went ba-doinkers with the Poker Clones and Poker Bots post. So…this isn’t about the Winery either, it’s about being grumbly.

Some days there is no way to put a finger on what is causing the grumbles, they just show up and your head is wrapped around a little stack of grey gloom and you have to fight your ass off to get out of it.  I haven’t started the fight yet.  I’m trying to ascertain why I would feel grumbly first, if that fails, then I will start the fight.

Starting the fight usually means I have to count my blessings.

I do, don’t you?

It’s always good to be reminded, and the reminding feels better if we do it ourselves than if someone else shoves it up our nose, of all the gifts we receive in life and obviously, some of use our gifts wisely and some just toss them into the next wind storm that’s raging across the desert where they become nonexistent.

I’m thankful that I can load a wheelbarrow 3/4 full of #2 gravel and push it the length of the property — yah, I’m puffing and panting but I can do more than one load before I give up for a rest.  That’s a huge blessing at my age.  I’m thankful I can see, hear (not as well as I used to), taste, chew, swallow, stand up, sit down, reach out and grab a glass with either hand, manage to feed myself with a fork without scarring up my face, cook meals, put together a food plan, drive a car, ride a bike, walk 3 to 4 miles without dying, and a million other things.  Oh…did I ever mention that I can also type about 100 words per minute?  That’s a true gift left over from my high school daze.  I did that on a manual typewriter where you had to reach up and pull the ‘return bar’ to start the next line.  My, my, how things have changed.

So…along with the physical blessings, I have a little slice of property in the desert with a very equitable payment that I can afford thanks to the generosity of a private banker I know.  I have a car that is troublesome and always needs something but I also have the blessing of a brother-in-law that lives right next to me and has helped me immensely with it — at a huge savings from what a repair shop would charge me. The same private banker loaned me the money to buy the car and even though I’m making payments, I have clear title to it.

I can mostly afford my monthly expenses and have a few pennies left over each month, for that I am very thankful.

My grandkids are all healthy and well, my sons are healthy and well, I am, for the most part, pretty healthy…some days not so well but what the hey, that’s life.

Ahhhhh…starting to feel a bit better about the grumbly already.

I have started to do some writing for the PokerNews team, it’s giving me a bit of a headache because it’s a learning curve and different from the PokerWorks CMS and requirements, but still…I am still employed.  That’s another huge plus.  Thank you, Matt Parvis, for working with me on this.  Another reason to be thankful.

On to other little things happening in my world.

My son, Dan, and I’ve decided we would build a #2 gravel jogging/walking path along the inside of the property.  That is to allow us to walk or jog even if the rain decides to muck up the silt out here in the desert.  Dan has been doing most of the hauling from the 40 some tons of gravel heaps that were dumped by Bedrock Gravel and once you spread it, you wet it, and then use a gravel/concrete stomper to pack it down.  It starts to resemble concrete once it dries out.  That’s the plan, concrete…kinda…sorta.  It’s about 90 feet long right now and still we have a long, long way to go. But it’s all about the exercise, right?  Right!

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The cat under the house is still driving Scout nutz, which in turn is driving me nutz.  I have to keep an eye on Scout most of the time when we go out to the yard together.  She wants to sneak off and start tearing the vent covers off of the block foundation if she thinks the cat is under there.

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I have close to 48 Nellie Stevens Hollies I planted over the last year and a half as border trees – to help with a privacy/wind screen and it’s a bitch trying to get them started.  They would make the perfect screen if they ever get a growth spurt and take off, width 8 to 12 feet — height up to 25 feet — leaves that have sticky tips on them — evergreen. Close to 20 of them have died over the last few years and I’ve replaced them. This is the first year they look like they are really going to grow, I got them as 12″ high seedlings.

There’s a spider mite thingy that likes to suck some of them dry so…I’ve been out spraying them with a detergent based solution.  I figure if they ever get to 3 to 4 feet, they will be mostly past the danger zone and they are supposed to grow 3 feet a year…yah…right!

Long and short of it, I put cedar mulch around them because cedar is supposed to repel bugs.  Bullshit!  To top it off, the quails like to burrow in it and lay their fat asses in a rounded hole they dig out.  For who knows what?  Cooling?  Dust to keep bugs/mites off of them?  There goes the cedar mulch, scattered everywhere.  Now I’m hauling rocks and broken pieces of pottery out to lay around the hollies and keep the cedar mulch in place.  I wish I didn’t live in a semi-populated area, I’d take that 10/22 Ruger rifle out and pop some heads off, and then cook them over a spit outside.  For reals!!!

But instead, the solution is to put the rocks around the hollies.

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Out of the clear blue, moving the router and plugging it back in either caused some type of power surge or it just felt that it had had too many downloads of Game of Thrones shooting through it and couldn’t keep up with the throats that were slit, the doggie-style humping, and the heads being chopped off. It tried to flash a glimmer of light now and then but refused to work so…a new one was in order.  That caused a huge interruption in my work flow for the day.  Obviously it’s taken care of or I wouldn’t be here now.

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Mr. Riot will be out on the 4th of June and stay with me until the 26, unless MomParental does an about face.  It’s happened before so I’ll plan on it until I hear otherwise.  Things are never good in that camp.  The queen of drama and discord rules his life — at least until he gets sick of it and decides it’s time to run away from home or do something different. She recently informed me that if I kept my fucking shit up, I’d never see him again.

My ‘fucking shit’ was having her overhear (she likes speaker phone conversations) my asking him if he was alright.  “Are you alright?” after I hadn’t heard from him in a week…not like he couldn’t get the flu or a cold or a bug at school or anything, right?

I heard her in the background screaming, “OF COURSE HE’S ALRIGHT!  WHY WOULDN’T HE BE ALRIGHT, HE’S WITH HIS MOTHER?”

It went on and on until he said he had to go, I couldn’t wait to hang up. Then I got the text.  It must be difficult to get up every day and always look for reasons to be unhappy, and then try to make everyone around you unhappy too has to make it even worse.  What a huge task.

Well…as it always goes in bipolar land, he might be able to call me the very next day as if nothing happened…or not.

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The finale of this post.  While cleaning out the wood and some things that were stacked along one side of the car shed, I found this fat little bad boy trying to escape. He’s got a web hooked over his tail from the bolt to the twig by him, I took a stick and moved it off, he was in full defense and his stinger was up.

This one I saw move between the paneling and the metal foundation, I raced to grab my camera and caught him on my side of the metal foundation.  He’s so small, compare him to the hex bolt and then the hole he slithered into is a bolt hole.

I think he’s a baby California King but not positive.  I did look up snakes in Southern Nevada and this is as close as I could guess.

You just never know what’s going to crawl in out of the desert…or anywhere else for that matter.

Less grumbly now…