Thursday, April 10, 2008

Leaf 'Em Laughing

We have two big, honey locust trees in our backyard that give off 90 kabillion tiny little leaves about an inch long. Normally, I like them; they're too small to rake up, and they get mulched up nicely when the Mister cuts the grass. I swear, last fall, when they finally fell, they did so in about two hours, so that we got around 6 inches of the suckers all over our yard. The snow came early last fall, and we didn't have time to clean up them up, and unless we want that to be our garden's "theme" this year, it had better happen soon. The city picks up yard waste on a designated week in the spring, and for some reason, this year they have decided that our week would be barely a couple of days after the snow melted.

I was out raking and bagging this afternoon, and Thing 2 decided to help me. That lasted about 5 minutes, after which she abandoned the pretense and played with the cat. After another while, she thought that I needed some entertainment, and got out her recorder and played me a few tunes. Thing 2 has many talents, but I'm afraid she will never make a meaningful living off of playing the recorder.

I had to keep asking her what the name of the tunes were, and after a while that degenerated into her playing a song and me having to figure out what it was. She was getting more and more disgusted with me, as I was having a devil of a time recognizing anything coming out of that instrument, including "Happy Birthday To You", "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Hey Jude", which all came out in the same squawky, dirge-like arrangements as everything else. Finally, I fell all over myself laughing when it was revealed that what I thought was The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald turned out to be Peter Cottontail. (Warning: that "Peter Cottontail" video on YouTube is hella creepy.)

At least it made the raking go faster.

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