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Temple, life overwhelms upon occasion and is doing so now, with me.
Awaiting Billy's return to these shores with anxious blighted garden anticipation. A Spanish or Mediterranean garden would be nice.
Yes, I allow Charley to return and return and the garden survives his visits and it gets picked up, which is all that the landlord really cares about. This is a rental home and the next renters will probably not water any of it anyway, letting it all die as they seem to like to do. So, if the garden survives Charley, it prepares it for its brutal future.
My problem now is that Charley has decided that I am a wonderful woman and keeps asking me out on dates. This is six years after beginning our gardening relationship at my various rental homes. I told him that I stopped dating at the age of 40 and have no plans, no desires, no nada about doing it again.....he accepts this, but then forgets between visits and asks me out again. Sigh......
posted by
benzinha
on August 24, 2004 at 10:23 AM
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Oh Abuelita, you are so sweet to let him come back time after time.
I'm not sure I would be so kind after such damage. I wish you could let Billy do your garden. He talks about plants, trees, flowers like some talk about their children. He reads about them and dreams of the perfect garden. He would be brilliant and gentle with or without liquid inspiration, I'm sure of that.
I am so glad to see you! We've both been gone so much. I'm finally catching up a little bit and reading what I've missed over the last 6 weeks. I hope you will stop by the Gidget and I hope you will be able to write more, I've missed you! Hope you can recover from your Hurricane Charley. :)
posted by
Temple
on August 23, 2004 at 2:28 PM
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maj, he's a sometimes artist and the parking lot lines would end up
looking like Buffie the Vampire Slayer !!!
The dogs are well. My old Makeda groans with bone pain like I do each morning in the monsoon season, but we get up and go on. Autumn is happy that the puppy that I was babysitting, Brownie, has gone home, she was a wild three month old.
The neighbor in the guest house has a new dog. Not only does he own Zhu Fung, the Chinese German Shepherd, but now Dillinger, the brindle pit bull (mixed with what ?!?!?) one year old. Autumn likes him up to a point. They race around the yard and get wild and then he doesn't stop and she hides under wooden benches out of his reach, panting until I let her inside. The women in this house like men in small doses only. Even Makeda played with him today. Her old bones will be sorry tomorrow, her limp is worse already.
posted by
benzinha
on August 19, 2004 at 11:10 PM
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oops, bird feeders in the trees and flowers to attract butterflies.
posted by
benzinha
on August 19, 2004 at 11:01 PM
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Frair, familiarity breeds green thumbs, the plants will teach you. I want
to work in your garden, tile mosaics on the cement walls, a bench for meditation next to a soft fountain, brilliant flowers blossoming everywhere !!! Bird
posted by
benzinha
on August 19, 2004 at 11:00 PM
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Teach him to paint parking lots!
Not so much to kill there.
How're the dogs?
posted by
majroj
on August 17, 2004 at 2:38 PM
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Abuelita,
be glad you have Charley. I only have myself -- and gardening is not one of the things I learned in the seminary.
posted by
Friar__Tuck
on August 17, 2004 at 8:17 AM
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LadyKenobi, I am properly chastised. Charleys, what can I say?
posted by
benzinha
on August 17, 2004 at 7:36 AM
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Ah, must be something in the name
Our Charley "gardened" out just about every young tree in my apt complex.
WE MISSED YOU! Never EVER leave like that again without leaving a note, young lady!!
posted by
LadyKenobi
on August 16, 2004 at 5:40 PM
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billy, maybe you won't garden as well sans beer. You are welcome here.
posted by
benzinha
on August 16, 2004 at 8:54 AM
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So beachbelle, you HAVE eaten at my house??!! Y'all come back now.
posted by
benzinha
on August 16, 2004 at 8:53 AM
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Maj, I do what I can to get him other jobs so that he won't come here so
often. I made up some signs on my computer " DEAD WEEDZ" with his phone number, his mom's answering machine and printed out about twenty of them. One is in his car window and he put the others out around town.
He usually only gets to work somewhere once, if he doesn't frighten the people away with his looks when he first arrives. He brutalizes their place, and not on purpose, but brain short circuits, and then he does some good work, too, confusing the garden owner..... and they make a conscious decision to help him out in future or not, to pass him on to family with warnings, or not.....
His life is hard, toothless and brain burned, he is given those horrible jobs in full sun in mid July hell, the scraping of weed covered back garden areas, car lots out back, etc. Poorly paid for all that and surviving, or rather, still alive.
posted by
benzinha
on August 16, 2004 at 8:52 AM
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telynor, we are his social services group, about twenty families and
businesses here in town who let him lay waste to usually bareodesert ground cevered with weedz, things that he can handle. When I have time, I stay with him to truly protect garden areas. I didn't this time. Oh well.....
posted by
benzinha
on August 16, 2004 at 8:44 AM
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Talion, yes, it will grow back. Yes, he likes X Files and things like that.
In a normal conversations, he'll mention people sending cats with monitoring devices hidden inside them ito his trailer (he's managed to maintain a trailer home for six months now, a real coup !!). He said that the cat suddenly came into his trailer and then rubbed all over him and then slept on his lap while he watched t.v. and that later he knew that someone had sent the cat on purpose, to monitor his t.v. watching, to spy and to report on his activities.
I laughed out loud and told him that he should be writing this down as good storytelling. He was hurt and I shall laugh less in future, because he believes these things and other wierder things. I do contradict him, telling him my version of what happened to him ( the cat saw an open door, wanted petting and knew you would be nice), but he laughs at my naivete'. The wind blew away half of his drawings the other day, but he remembers them, now one week later, as having been purposefully taken away from him and wind being blown into his brain to make him forget the incident.
I know who he is and how he is and let my garden suffer to maintain part of his trailer payments, along with about twenty other kind souls in town. I am just happy that he is more stable. He is very unstable, not violent, just brain burned and missing parts, but More stable.
posted by
benzinha
on August 16, 2004 at 8:41 AM
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benzinha I'd like to do your garden...
i'm gentle...even back in the days when I'd ride around drinking beer all day, going from job to job people like the work I did in their yards. When I get out of the Nav I'll start it up again, this time without as much Budwieser inspiration.
posted by
FreeManWalking
on August 16, 2004 at 12:45 AM
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So pleased to see you post again.Charley sounds like a bull in a china shop
It is the same with anything I guess. Take cooking for instance - some people destroy food by overcooking and poor presentation.
posted by
beachbelle
on August 15, 2004 at 4:37 AM
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Charley needz a new job elsewhere.
Put a card on a bulletin board at a local college. Can't be worse than Mr Agent Orange.
posted by
majroj
on August 14, 2004 at 6:50 PM
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That is --
Indescribable. Horrible. Now, me, I kill plants, I don't have a green thumb at all, but to see that sort of destruction taking place -- horrors.
posted by
telynor
on August 14, 2004 at 12:49 PM
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Well, what did you expect from a guy who would rather watch a smart-mouthed high school girl kill vampires? It didn't seem as though subtlety and care would be his finer points. It'll grow back. Won't it?
posted by
Talion
on August 14, 2004 at 11:26 AM
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