May the Fourth be with you!

I woke up at 6:00AM on Saturday (May the Fourth, lol).  I made a cup of coffee and posted to the Blog. After breakfast and pills, I watched the morning local and national news until it was 9:30 AM. Then I shaved, showered, and remade my grocery list (I lost the original somewhere).

I headed out to Kroger’s. They are adding onto one end of the store, so everything was topsy-turvy.  But, I eventually found where they had moved the produce and so forth.

On the way home, I stopped at the Wine Palace to get some Marsala wine for Chicken Marsala. But, there were both sweet and dry! I had a brain fart about which I needed so I sent a text to Jake. He suggested dry as when the sauce reduced, sweet would be too sweet. So, I grabbed a bottle of the dry.

Back home, I unloaded the groceries and returned a phone call from my Brother Carl. I had emailed him asking what kinds of perennials go in an English Garden. He had called to tell me there was a show on the DIY network where they were building an English garden, so I went in and watched it. Unfortunately, they didn’t really identify many of the plants…

Then I changed clothes and headed out back. First, I spread the mulch on the reflecting pool garden. When I had it done, I brought out the turtle, the young Shaolin monk and the gargoyle. Then I went to get the riding lawnmower. I need to see the radius of the curves I can make with the mower to determine where the rest of the mulch around St. Francis should go.

Well, I thought I would get the mower! The battery was dead (even though I charged it up last winter). So, I put the charger on it again, turned it to “rapid charge” and waited…

When it was fully charged, I tried to start it up. It turned over once and the battery died. Damn! So, I pushed it out of the garage, pulled the car out and jumped the mower battery with the car one. I have a stupid safety feature that, if you get up from the seat, the mower shuts off. So, I let them both run a while and then shut off the mower. I pulled the car back in the garage and tried to start the tractor. It ran the battery down after turning over twice!!

I was pissed, thinking I had just replaced the battery last year. Then I remembered it was two years ago and the tractor sat idle for the entire season last year.

So, I jumped it again, this time using a bar clamp to hold down the seat. I left the mower running while I pulled the car inside and shut the garage door.

Sidebar: It might just be the neighborhood I live in, but a good rule of thumb is to never work in the backyard with the garage door open up front. Things might go missing…

I was able to cut about 2/3 of the back lawn with the riding mower (the rest of the lawn was blocked by the ruts). I had to run the mower at low speed, though, and bounced over ruts and clumps of sod. I probably trashed the mower blades.

When I had the lawn finished (well, as much as I could finish with the tractor), I pulled it back in the garage (I bring the garage door opener along with me) and shut the door. I went inside to pee (I think I lost a kidney while bouncing back there, BTW) and it was about 3:30 PM.

I took a break and then went out to spread the rest of the mulch by St. Francis. By the time my back started screaming, I had the St. Francis garden done, all the excess mulch in that area picked up and the lawn raked. I used the wheelbarrow to take some of the extra mulch and put it on the new garden at the rear of the house. I still had two wheelbarrow loads of mulch left when that garden was finished, so I added them to the pile on Jake’s patio.

I put my tools away and then got some charcoal fired up. I wanted to grill some brats for next week’s leftovers, but apparently so did everyone else in the area. The only brats left in the store this morning were one pack of the beer brats and an Irish-garlic (?) brat version that I never even heard of before. When the coals were ready and the grate cleaned and oiled, I threw both packs on. I also put on the last remaining foil-wrapped ear of corn we had roasted last Sunday.

The steak I planned for my dinner had come up to room temperature and was sitting on the kitchen counter, seasoned with lots of coarse sea salt and fresh black pepper.

I took the brats off when they were finished and threw the steak on. I was still turning the ear of corn occasionally. When I thought the steak was ready, I pulled it off and took it inside. I put a pat of butter on top of it, covered it with aluminum foil and let it rest.

I ate the steak and the ear of corn with gusto (I hadn’t eaten since my oatmeal breakfast). Both were delicious!

It was almost 8:00 PM, so I cleaned up the dishes, closed the windows and started watching the Red Wings game, already in progress. We lost, big-time (4-0)! Disgusted, I watched a couple taped DIY shows until I was sleepy, and then went to bed. I had to get up and take a pain pill, though, to actually fall asleep.