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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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9:26 p.m. - 2004-05-30
I’ll get to the bad news about the rocks in a minute. First I have to tell you… A Short Anecdote from My (barely) Wicked Youth™ My high school boyfriend Richard attended the local community college after he graduated. (He went on to a 4 year school, but this is not relevant to the tale.) He was kind of an electronics whiz and he signed up in the VERY nascent computer department. Back in the dim dark days of FORTRAN and COBOL and it took all day to program a computer to make a small light bulb go blinky-blinky. Techno-geeks we shall always have among us and most of the guys in the program were on the dorky side. Especially this one guy who shall be ever after known as Joe the Dweeb. Joe the Dweeb was the very worst kind of dweeb. He didn’t know he WAS a dweeb. Joe the Dweeb was under the erroneous impression that he was a bad mo-fo. Joe the Dweeb had a car. A Camaro. A flame orange Camaro. He loved that car more than his dick. In fact I think the Camaro was his dick, the doodle in his jeans was still pristine at the ripe old age of 19. The guy had a Camaro and couldn’t get laid! That’s how big a dweeb he was. So we’re hanging out in the parking lot behind the computer lab and Joe the Dweeb is going on and on about how he was thinking of getting custom plates for his Camaro. The phrase Joe the Dweeb wanted on his license plates had only two meanings. A semi-scientific one relating to electronics and a corrupt one. (This was 1978, you understand. Angus, Malcom and the boys had yet to record their first album.) Joe the Dweeb was so out of it he was totally unaware of the corrupt meaning. With those plates, he boasted, ALL the chicks would be impressed. (You can see where this is going, can’t you?) We fell down laughing. We howled and snorted and Joe the Dweeb was getting angry. Finally, Richard gasps out, “Hey man, I don’t think it’s CHICKS you’ll be picking up if you put that on your license plates!” The phrase Joe the Dweeb wanted to enshrine on his plates? AC/DC!!!!!!! Told you he was a dweeb. We should have let him. Truly we should have. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now about the rocks. I gardened today. Kinder, gentler gardening than my frenzy earlier this week. Everything is in now except the tomatoes and 3 rose bushes. The other rose bushes went in the holes I’d prepped already. Those were on the outside of the front walk. I wanted to put the last 3 up in the bed I was working on in front of the porch. (Our whole yard is tiered. The house is set into a hill. A hill which slopes upward from the road at a steady 45* angle. The front walk is about 18” above the driveway and the porch-front bed is another 18” above the walk. 26 stairs between the front door and the mailbox. Perfect for a crip like me, eh?) Rose bushes have to be set in much deeper holes than those I’d dug for the other flowers. About 8-10 inches down I start hitting rock. A lot of rock. BIG rocks. And worse, chunks of concrete. Lots of concrete. I’m guessing there was a poured slab down there at one time. Marie, the house’s original owner (who was a speed demon driver and nutty as a fruitcake according to the mail lady) must have had the slab broken up with a jack hammer and then had a couple loads of topsoil dumped right on top of it. No wonder that nasty pricker bush was so shallow-rooted! Dang! To do any decent perennial gardening in there means I have to dig up all the rock and concrete and find the actual earth beneath. If there is any. It’s going to be a long summer. Plus, I can say good-bye to my nails. I broke two of them while I was excavating today. Stoned (and not the good way), ~LA Today’s Pick: “Rock Rock Til You Drop” by AC/DC* (*of course!)
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