Guess what, Honey? It's an 'A'!

The summer semester is over. It was brutal and long and I didn't feel like I really had a summer. But it's over and to my disbelief, I got A's. No '-''s just A's. For the first time in my life I got a 4.0 GPA. *listens to the stunned silence of his siblings and parents* Yeah, that's what I thought your reaction might be. I am just as surprised. I owe it all to a whip-cracking(supportive and encouraging) wife. Seriously. Without her, I might have some B's and C's but she wouldn't let me be content with that. She knows I can do better and I'd better do it. :) I also have to give some thanks to lenient managers who let me take a class during the day and didn't mind me doing homework when I had some waiting time.

I can't fully express what it means to me to get a 4.0. I did horribly in middle school and only sort of pulled my act together in high school. Sure I graduated with a 3.6 but there are a lot of chior, theatre and creative writing credits padding that. It's not that I wasn't smart enough...I was just lazy. I procrastinated. I didn't have the drive for perfection. And I'm pretty sure I didn't believe I could do it. I had 4.0 older and younger siblings. I'm almost positive my 3.6 is the lowest overall GPA of any of my siblings. But I wasn't as smart. I wasn't as good. Granted my drive for this 4.0 was me being thrown in the trunk and my wife steering and holding the gas pedal down but I did it. I took the tests, did the assignments. I DID it. I stared at the computer screen for hours studying. I DID IT!!! Of course now...the only problem is I know I can, I know I should and now...I can't settle for anything less. Crap.

Being exhausted...and other parental myths

What a summer this has been. On July 3rd and I had 5 tons of 3/4" rock dumped on the street in front of my house. It was so heavy it shook the houses and my neighbors wondered if we were having an earthquake. I don't want to count the amount of wheelbarrow loads that I hauled as I laid rock over weed blocking material down both sides of my house and a 10'ish by 10'ish pad in by the back 'fence'. That doesn't include the loads of pea gravel I moved to make space for that pad. But it's done. It was long hard, heavy work and I lost inches even if I didn't lose weight. Which is at least some consolation for the back-breaking arm dislocating labor. Oh and I had to dig up a bunch of weeds to make space for the rock. In the end I was able to look proudly at my work and it looks so much nicer than the weeds that used to live there.

Well, while that was going on my garden was growing. Not anything I wanted to harvest but a couple of weeds were as tall as the 6' fence. Last week I took some 'weed-death-juice' to them and watched them go from green to tall yellow-brown sentinals of pokey evil. I was hoping to be able to pawn the job off on some local boys for cheap. Think Young Men's service project. But I never got around to organizing it and the boys who's mom said they might be interested never called. I wouldn't have either. You would have needed to pay me quite a bit if it wasn't my own yard. We're cheap. We don't pay quite a bit.

So this morning I went out to play paintball at the unholy hour of 6am. It was a nice temp out at least. I got to use my flatline barrell that I got for Father's Day finally. I also learned why paintballs break in barrells. It was a couple of really good games though and I enjoyed it. But what the heck does that have to do with the price of SlimJims at 7-11? Well, then I came home and took a nap. THEN, I told my wife that I needed to mow the lawn and I was considering pulling weeds. She said she would rather I pull weeds than mow the lawn...and if I was only going to do one, it should be weeds. But I didn't mow the lawn last week. So it's two weeks of "growth" that needs to be cut. I went outside and decided it was only going to be one. Weeds, here I come.

Now I sit here with legs so tired that I can barely stand. You can see the garden again. That's good, right? With school this summer I just haven't taken care of my yard like I want to....ok to be honest I never take care of my yard like I want to. But I took care of it even less than that. It's just lucky we have autmatic sprinklers or it wouldn't be watered either!

And now I'm being begged for some ring-around-the-rosey with my twins so I'll be signing off.