How I spent my wife's birthday . . .

. . . (or, "The worst is yet to come!")

(written on 6/2, with a post date of 5/26, so some hindsight included)

With the air conditioning fixed, we were able to turn our attention this morning to the yard work we wanted to get done. We got our vegetables and herbs planted last week, but there was still plenty of overgrowth to be dealt with along the fence in back, with the wild grape vines wilder than ever.  And we were also overdue to mow again, with my mower on the fritz after I thought we'd fixed it. We arranged to borrow some yard tools - including a mower - from a friend who's out of town for a wedding, so while my wife and aunt headed out to the market to start the day, I started in on the vines.

The day definitely had a full slate.  Folks were supposed to start arriving around 4 for the party.  I promised tri-tips and cheesecake; we picked the former up yesterday from the grocery, my aunt made the cheesecake in our hot kitchen before they got the a/c fixed, and a chocolate dump cake was on the agenda for today.  My sister-in-law and our friends from Nebraska were slated to arrive this afternoon, and the latter thought they were going to have to park their camper trailer in our driveway, as they weren't able to get a campground reservation anywhere for Memorial Day weekend.

So I went out to get an early start on the yard work, and was really glad I did.  It didn't cool down very much last night, and didn't take long to start heating up again.  I used the hedge trimmer to take down the severely overgrown grape vines, and wouldn't realize my miscalculation about them until later in the day.  I completely forgot that we used to have poison ivy along that fence. The full extent of that mistake would become apparent over the coming days.

I got the grass cut, including the vines I'd just taken down, and got cooled down and showered in plenty of time to be back on track for dinner.  Soaked the wood chips for the tri-tips, rubbed the meat down with salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and everything was in pretty good shape when my wife's sister and brother-in-law arrived.  There was time for us to share a drink before the other guests arrived.  I didn't want to subject our other friends to another drinking party when they'd just been such good sports for our wine and cheese get together the previous weekend.  Our local friends arrived shortly thereafter, and the meat was finished in time for us to eat at a quite reasonable time.  Our Nebraska friends ended up getting into the campground on base, so dropped off their trailer before they came to join us a little further into the evening.

It was a really nice get together.  Our choir director and I compared notes on not having used either of the recipes we'd exchanged last summer - I'd fix my part of that soon enough.  I got out the new guitar and picked a little.  About 9 in the evening, I started to notice the telltale signs of the poison ivy I'd forgotten all about.  At first I thought I'd gotten it from another spot in the yard, in which case I couldn't have gotten very much exposure.  It would be at least another two days before I realized where I really got it from, and how deeply I'd gotten into it, and what a bad omen it was that the reaction started to appear less than 12 hours after the exposure.  Fortunately it was mostly on my arms, with just a little exposure on my legs that would show up about a day later.  A miserable few days was coming.

Still the day was very nice.  Oh, and last night, while we were at the fabric shop before going out for supper, I bought the mrs. the new sewing machine she's been pining for.  She really seems to like it, though, as of this writing, I'm not sure she has plugged it in yet.