It’s rare to find a dog as crazy as Lucy, so when we did, we made sure to make that dog feel welcome and loved at our house.  This delightful furball is named Olive and she loves to come over and have her head inside of Lucy’s mouth.  She barks and runs around like crazy, and Lucy welcomes her with some unladylike hip flexor exercises.  It’s mayhem and it’s quite delightful.   And because it’s fall, and it’s burr season, I decided to do some weeding today to save Olive from any unfortunate incidents with burrs.  Lucy too – she recently had two in her tail and she wagged them into Jack’s lip so let’s just say that getting rid of this plant from our yard was going to benefit everybody.

But wait, back it up, beep beep beep.  Why was I gardening on a Tuesday in the middle of the day?  Well, if you don’t know already, I quit my job at the beginning of the summer to regain my sanity and spend some time with the kids.  I also thought I could use the extra 80 hours a week of not working to bust out my book that I have been working on at the rate of one paragraph a year for ten years.   How is that going you ask?  The kids are happy, I am not super worried about dying from a stress induced heart attack anymore, I’ve read a lot, I work out,  I have been writing a bit.  There have been meals prepared, and vacations have been taken.  It’s been good!  But my book is in a blah phase where I don’t feel like working on it.  It turns out that when I don’t use my sleeping time for working out and reading, I get a normal amount of sleep, but there doesn’t seem to be that much extra time in the day.   Last  year, I just removed burrs from the dog as they came into the house.  This year, I spent half an hour trying to dig out the plant with the burrs.  I got about 10 inches down into the soil and the root was still bigger around than my arm.   I got rid of the plant and a solid 10 inches of root, but what did that buy me? It will be back.  It always comes back.

I’ll tell you what it bought me, it bought me a head full of burrs.  I was going to include a picture here, but you can imagine.  Picture a dog with burrs in it’s fur, and then picture me, with my long and glorious and expensive hair.  You cut the burrs out of your dogs hair right?  Well I painstakingly removed each individual hair from the tangle.  This happened moments after I said, “OH NO, I gardened for so long, now I barely have time to shower, eat lunch and get to school in time to get my volunteer badge picture taken before my volunteer time!!!!!!”   Where does the time go indeed.  Weirdly I made it on time, (thanks for making my lunch, hon) with my hair in a bun on top of my head.  (That’s my stylish lice prevention hairdo.) And I had time to get an insane looking picture taken for my volunteer badge.  If you had no backgound info on me at all, if we just met, you’d look at the badge photo and say to yourself, “she has the crazy eyes of someone who just pulled burrs out of her own hair.”

As I detangled and de-burred my hair, I thought two things.  1.) I should just shave it all off now before I get lice anyway.  (It’s that time of year, people.) and 2.) It may be time to go back to work.  I never got a head full of burrs when I was working full time.