Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi...

...I exist, and I find it nauseating.

Okay, so yesterday I went out to collect firewood, right? And there's this big dead tree halfway down one of the wash embankments that's been mocking me. And I had all sorts of trouble with the chainsaw, which ... well, they need to be cleaned from time to time or they develop bizarre behavior problems. So I went home, cleaned the saw and got it working right.

And there's this big dead tree halfway down one of the wash embankments that's been mocking me. And I've already cut all the easy limbs off it, and so now I was working to free up the big, valuable ones whose ends are buried in the sand. Which of course means the whole weight of the tree is resting on them, so just about the time I got the first cut made in one of those big limbs the tree would slide down about an eighth of an inch, neatly trapping the chainsaw bar so that I thought I'd have to abandon the bar and chain at one point. But stubbornness can be your friend, except when it's your enemy, so I managed to get two of the big limbs off the tree and into the trailer, leaving the one that was holding the rest of the tree up, and ... well, you probably know what happened when I cut through the last one.

The good news is that I wasn't killed. If that was good news, because I took a loverly tumble down the embankment, and of course my first concern was the fact that I was holding a working chainsaw at the time, so I wasn't too focused on where I was going to land. Shouldn't have mattered - there was nothing down there but soft sand and it wasn't much of a drop.

Well, there was nothing down there but soft sand and a whole bunch of jagged tree limbs I'd industriously cut off to get to the big stuff. Ouch.

Bloodied but relatively unbowed, I went home and cut up what I had on the trailer. I'll try the tree again from above, next time.

And then I'm sitting in my chair with a good book and an adult beverage, and it's getting dark. The boys have had their time outdoors, and all should be well. And Little Bear is lying next to the door, which is where he usually lies in the evening, and he's staring at me.

He's just really fixedly staring at me.

And I should know by now that that's more important than he's making it look. Because the next thing that happens is that there's this truly horrible smell, and LB voids about a month's worth of what should really, really be done outside.

Over the course of the very long night, he does it three more times. I only successfully got downstairs quick enough to let him out once. Note to self: Paper towels.

So all morning I feel like a zombie, and I'm in a really foul mood. I'm yelling at the boys for things they didn't really do wrong, and feeling bad about that, and nothing is going quite right and it's just cloudy enough that the inverter's weeping about having to run the 'pooter and everything's taking twice as long as it should, and it's shit-shoveling day so I pack them up to take them to Gitmo.

And the trailer's still on the Jeep because I need to get more wood. And bouncing down the ridge road the hitch comes unstuck, and starts dragging and crashing into the Jeep then dragging more, and the dogs freak out, and...

Some days...