Gonna dig me a hole (gonna dig me a hole), Gonna put a nerd in it

Yesterday:

Todays activities: baking a cake and planting more flowers.

The cake is butter pecan with vanilla frosting, both from box/can because I'm super important.  I need to do super important things like go to Home Depot and impulse buy flowers.

I forgot how frosting works, but nothing says Happy Father's Day quite like "I was too stupid to think of buying back up frosting when I went to Kroger's earlier today, and going to Wal-Mart could interfere with digging holes in the yard."

I did manage to buy a big ass bag of pecans to put on the parts of the cake that were actually frosted.  The fact that I could stuff my mouth with any pecans that I did not deem cake quality was not a factor in my decision to decorate the cake with exactly the type of nuts I enjoy stuffing in my mouth (hurr hurr).

This is probably the gayest Father's Day cake ever, but I didn't know if I'd have time to pull off anything awesome.  And without karate to bring leftover desserts to, cupcakes wouldn't be practical.  (I did consider the lazy, store bought route, but finding James Bond cake toppers is, as always, a challenge.)

And then it was time to dig holes in the ground and stuff plants in them.

The new rose bush really makes the little surviving one look like a piece of crap.  But I'm sure given enough time we'll break this one too.

Have I mentioned yet how much I hate annuals?  And our horrible dirt?  And digging in our horrible dirt to plant annuals?

I picked up two Tiny Skyline Lilies that have promised to come back year after year, assuming no one becomes over-enthusiastic and digs them up to put in more god damn annuals.  Once they bloom they're going to be a bright orange.  Just like today's gardening ensemble: my orange sneakers, my orange shorts, and my orange sports bra.  I ain't classy, but at least I'm color coordinated.  I'm what happened after Lala Orange left the Color Kids to move back in with her parents in the suburbs.

I think it's super important that you know that, after finishing this project, I was covered in dirt, purloined suntan lotion, bug spray, and sweat.  Lots and lots of sweat.  We Simonsens are notorious sweaters, and apparently after twenty minutes tilling the soil and being abused by Angry Sun, my stomach gleams with the sweat of an honest day's complaining.

Today

The rose bush already has several new blooms and lots of little buds.  More of the Tiny Skylines look like they're ready to go.

In celebration of Father's Day and to get ready for the Daddy Daughter Henrico County Landfill Visit, I've been picking up glass.  Because we couldn't live in a house that was built on an ancient Indian burial ground--we had to live over a reclaimed garbage dump.  Except the garbage is pretty much all shards of glass.  (Because I am the coolest kid you know, I have been silently singing "Walking on Broken Glass" to myself during this super-awesome activity.)

I also decided it was time to dig the suet cage out of the front bushes and accept that the squirrels won't let me have nice bird feeders.

While there I moved some earthworms off the front walkway to flower plots (like I said, coolest kid you know) and found a tiny little snail.  And, quite conveniently, a paper clip for helping with size comparisons.

I don't think I've ever seen snails out here.  One time when Mike and I were in LA, a lot of them came out on his patio after it rained, but I can't remember seeing any Virginia snails before.  Definitely slugs and a lot of those little pill bugs as the old man and I have been digging shit up and killing grass, but no snails.

Yes, part of the recent gardening project has involved killing the grass.  We attempted to suffocate it under garbage bags, and then got tired of waiting and just dug and tore it up.  You may be interested to know that this grass was doing much better than the rest of the lawn.