Too much exercise

So after the front blew through this morning, L, M, and I went out and did some serious Yard Cleanup.  Two big gales of wind in the last week left the yard covered in leaves, and blew down an awful lot of pecans as well, and since I get home after dark on weeknights and can’t do yardwork, it had to get done today.  So L raked, and I raked and raked and RAKED, and we all picked up pecans.  The picking up pecans part involved a ton of stooping and grubbing around on hands and knees, raking débris from under plants and hedges, pawing through piles of fallen leaves and raking to turn over the piles by turns.  We finished almost all the yard, save one spot that’s unlikely to yield any nuts, and filled a five-gallon bucket completely with the day’s harvest.  My lower back and knees ache fiercely, my nose is dripping from all the dust I stirred up and breathed, my breathing sounds squeaky, and L says her hip sockets are complaining.  Tomorrow I’ll see what I can do about sorting what we gathered.  L thinks we might get as much as a hundred pounds in-shell this year, which I believe is a bit high, but not a lot.

Yesterday we made a very fast trip to Comanche, to get the pickup Mother is lending me for commuting.  It’s going to have to go to the shop at once, because something is wrong with the engine that makes it hesitate and buck horribly when you try to accelerate, and is likely to get me killed on the freeway if I can’t resolve it.  (I kinda suspect it has a leaky vacuum line on the timing advance.)  On the way, we went round by US 281 and Hamilton instead of US 183 and Goldthwaite, because L wanted to look for a gate sign a friend sent her a picture of.  He didn’t really believe it existed, but it turned out the picture (and the gate) was real and not Photoshopped.  (It ain’t “just south of Comanche” as the caption says; it’s a mile west of Gustine and about ten miles east of Comanche on the south side of Texas 36.)

On the way back, we drove to Dublin (twenty miles northeast of Comanche) and picked up a case of old-style Dr Pepper, made the original (and proper) way with Imperial Pure Cane Sugar, from the Dublin Dr Pepper plant (and if you don’t know why this is a Big Deal, go read and find out) as a present for T.  Unfortunately, we got there just too late to take a 45-minute tour of the bottling plant, and couldn’t afford to wait around for the next tour.  Just as well, probably; I wanted to go on the tour with T, so I’ll have another go at scheduling a trip to Dublin when she can be there.  I haven’t toured the place since 1967, when my Cub Scout den got to go through, and I’d like to see what they’ve done (and not done) to the place.  (ETA:  T just got home, and is now “savoring”—her word—a DP, pronouncing it ever so much better than the one she drank at College Station earlier in the day.)  We had lunch in Dublin at a dinky li’l Mexican joint that served some good and unexpected food from Zacatecas as well as the expected enchilada plates and No. 1 Dinners.  I ordered a perfectly delicious dish of diced beef tongue covered with raw onion and cilantro, and served with nopalitos and refritos.  I couldn’t finish it all, so L carried the leftovers home and had them for dinner, agreeing that it was delicious.

Last night we went to see the production of The Secret Garden for which L built all those costumes (of twenty-four, she built eight and a quarter by the time the curtain went up, and will finish the missing bits in coming days to complete all nine).  The director added us to the guest list, so we were able to see the show without shelling out ten dollars apiece.  I carried my SLR along and we made certain to get there early enough that I could take pictures of the actors in costume for L’s portfolio.  The production was enjoyable, interesting and fairly effective, although it took a number of liberties with the original novel.  It’s worth seeing, and I may be willing to go when the Zilker Summer Musical puts it on next summer.

The outback cactus will rearrange a CD collection.  Fnord.