Whew!

Find myself exhausted today in spite of the fact that, as far as I'm aware, I got an okay night's sleep. I'm blaming the summertime weather. Yes, I have AC now but shut up. I like blaming things.

In the bad news/good news realm, I stumbled out of the house this morning to find that my left front tire was starting to go flat. As you can imagine, this was exactly the thing I wanted to deal with while feeling like a zombie.

Fortunately (part the first) there's a garage right across the street from where I work. The tire wasn't ideal but it was inflated enough for me to drive carefully for 10 min on, so I took my chances to get it there, figuring I could drop it off, tell them to do whatever they needed to and pick it up and pay for it at lunch or after work (and thus make it to work on time as well).

However, fortunately (part the second) there was no wait, the guy I talked to was uber-nice, and within 10 min he fixed the flat and sent me on my way only $10 poorer than when I'd come in. Can't beat that.

Flat turned out to be caused by a screw in the tire. I have no idea when I drove over carpentary, but there we are. At least it was a simple puncture and easy to deal with.

[Yaaaaaaaaaawn] Now to make it through the work day.

ETA: BWA HA HA HA HA!

Look! I got stuff!

I braved heat, traffic, and a near-miss with not getting out of work early (My boss, at 3:25 "Hey, why don't you clean up the back room and then we'll both leave early." My boss, at 3:30 when I'm done with the back room "You know, as long as we've got some free time, let's do billing." ARGH!) in order to finally get around to buying some plants for my back porch.

For those of you who are not actively stalking me - or at least not doing so via hiding out in the bushes outside my home - what you need to picture in order to get the full impact here is 5 planters which used to be filled with some not-bad decorative stuff (including a bleeding heart plant) and one planter filled with irises that were really not putting forth the work effort, all of which died a horrible, flamey death in last summer's heat wave, a crime which was, admittedly, greatly helped by the fact that as distracted as I was during the whole "move/I need a job" thang that I never even tried to save them.

Come this year, though, I knew I wanted to try, try again, so, finally, I headed over to the nursery.

There I had the most wonderful gairid to help me. She understood my complete inability to raise plants and kindly steered me towards things that should, in theory, be hard for me to kill while at no time presenting me with a plastic cactus. She also understood my desire to have nice plants, as evidenced by the following conversation:

Gairid: Now for easy to care for there's always begonias but they're just so.... boring.
TBQ: Yes.
Gairid: I mean everybody has them!
TBQ: They're like the fanon of gardening.
Gairid, nodding sagely: Yes, exactly.

So, after a half hour in the insane heat and I came back with basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme, lavendar, a tomato plant and a few decorative flowers that I have since forgotten the names of but can at least classify as "purple" "pink" and "not begonias". They've been placed into various pots, watered accordingly and I give them approximately seven days to live, knowing my track record. But still. Yay!