I did get the front yard done today and finished the back yard and got the branches Sandy cut from the east side of the house bundled and set out. So officially everything is back to normal, lawn maintenance anyways. We had a little rain this afternoon and a cold front moved through. Should be a beautiful weekend. I may even head over to men’s breakfast at the church tomorrow. Then I’ve got some maintenance to do on the truck so it’s ready to roll for the next adventure.

So with the sticker harvest almost complete and the lawn initially mowed on the highest setting, it was time to lower and mow again. I also decided to sharpen the blades on the mower. I got the bench grinder and mounted it to the sudo-bench that I have and pulled the blade off with the impact gun and away we went. It was nice to have all the tools to do that properly.

Tomorrow we’ll knock out the front yard and then we’re planning an agent orange event to combat the stickers. And tomorrow is Friday and even though it doesn’t mean much to me, I still like it. Oh, and football starts again tonight and while I’m no a fanatic about the sport, it’s nice to have it back, it signals fall.

Today it rained all day. A beautiful light rain that made the air smell good and kept the temperature in the low 70’s. These are the days we were looking for and they are so rare down here. I need to find someplace it does this a couple of times a month, not once every three years. Other than that the only thing I did was register for Microsoft Learn for the Azure training. I’ll get started on that tomorrow.

Funny how life works out. I accepted a job offer which will see me assisting an organization off of Taleo. Super excited about it because I know what I’m doing and I should be able to make a positive impact on the organization. So I’m booked for at least the next couple of months.

I should probably have my head examined but I turned down a job making 70k a year, it was remote too. But I just didn’t feel it, it was a data entry position and they would provide the hardware and it was a mac. I think that I would have done well but I can do better. I didn’t want to get saddled into a job that didn’t have any room for growth.

Mom wanted ribs for mother’s day and who am I to say no:) Got up at 8am and fired up the smoker and started the ribs. Mom, sis and Ron came over and we had ribs, corn on the cob and baked beans while the grass eaters had salmon, salad and broccoli. We had cake and mom enjoyed the album Sandy put together for her with pictures of me from birth to age 3.

Also today happens to be my kittens 6th birthday. I did sing them happy birthday and gave them the 6 spankings they had coming. I think it was lost on them but it meant something to me. I read an article the other day and it said that domestic short haired cats live to be 12 so it’s midlife for them. I really hope and pray that they beat the average.

It’s been a little sad though, there’s been a lot of deaths recently. Aside from Kelly and Wendy which I blogged about earlier, Susan Tucker Henderson passed, she was the receptionist at PDS when I worked there. I also found out Brandi Hix passed at the age of 46. This means at least 3 people I know of are observing their first mother’s day without a mom. This made me a little sad. While death is the logical conclusion of life, it’s finality is heartbreaking.

So as I’m waiting for the interview from the CA place, I get a call from a recruiter that contacted me a month ago about my TCC expertise, now he wants to submit me for a position. Oh well when it rains it pours. I had the interview that was planned and it seems like it’s more of an admin assistant position. I blew through it because, it turned out it didn’t really have anything to do with data analytics. Oh well, we’ll see what happens next week, this weekend I’ll just enjoy life and let tomorrow take care of itself.

It’s getting warm here in Texas. Sandy and I did our grocery shopping today, went to Kroger and shopped the sales and then to Walmart for staples like milk, cheese and lunch meat.

We came home and decided to jump on the bikes and head over to the mall to get steps, people watch and grab a bite for lunch. We walked the mall and found ourselves in the food court having Chic-fil-A. I was checking out Facebook and we were stunned to see we lost a classmate. Wendy (Dittman) Lipinski died of a brain tumor at 51. While I didn’t know her, I’d been in classes with her and my memory of her is that she was very quite. A nice person who I didn’t really know, and reading her obituary made me sad that I didn’t know her better.

While Sandy and I were reading the comments, it was revealed another friend from high school in our class had also passed. Kelly (Farley) Games just passed yesterday, it’s still too early for that obituary. That one struck closer to home as Kelly and I had actually talked (messaged) recently enough and I knew her. She celebrated her only sons 20th birthday just last week at Red Lobster. She’d been married to Mike for just over 3 years. She’d recently been diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time and just started chemo 4 days ago after a battle with her insurance to get started on it. She had said the side effects didn’t kick in until day 3 and she was in a lot of pain.

Sandy and I came home kind of stunned and then held each other while we both cried. There was a horrible realization that life is finite and that it ends without much warning.

I drained the gas out of the tiller since I believe we’re done with it for the season. It was a beautiful day and Sandy and I went for a 12 mile bike ride around Hurst. I’ve decided I’m going to take my picture in front of all the parks in the city. So I got 3 of the parks knocked out.

Tomorrow is the eclipse and unfortunately it looks to be cloudy, but it’s nothing I’m going to lose sleep over. We’ll see how it goes.