One of these days, Alice...

Pow! Zoom! To the moon, Alice!

In between strange weather phenomena, I'd finally completed the layout for the concrete piers to be poured under Joel's Secret Lair, Final Edition. Got the batter boards up and level (and you'd laugh if you saw how uneven their heights had to be, to achieve "level" on the long sides of the site.) Got strings pulled for the borders and center pier locations. Good work, thought I.

Yeah. Should have marked those locations with something more substantial than the intersections of jute string. I know my companions' ways. Totally my fault.

So this morning I get up, dress, eat, start looking for my favorite gloves. My $17.95 doeskin-palm work gloves that I couldn't afford but just had to have. My very best gloves. The one pair of gloves I absolutely should never have forgotten at the build site just before last night's windstorm/thunderstorm/snowstorm. Gah!

Suddenly an early walky seemed like just the thing to do, before all that snow melted. Off we went, to the delight of the boys who would have been terribly disappointed in me if I'd waited till the temperature climbed as I usually do. They were so delighted, in fact, that they were still frisking and gamboling about when we got to the site, where that clumsy, bumbling, blundering, disaster-area-in-a-fur-coat hippopotamic land-mass of a Fritz thundered right through my so-very-carefully laid-out spiderweb of string as if it wasn't even there, breaking every single...

He didn't even notice, and had no dreaming clue what I was so mad about. Next time I use kevlar trip-wire, though I doubt they sell it at our little town's sad excuse for a hardware store.

Private to my landlady: It was an effort, but for you I let him live.