I'm not going to sound like a broken record. Suffice it to say that you can probably guess where I'm sitting, what kind of day it is, etc. I wish it could stay 4:00 today for the next 72 hours or so. With sleeping and eating in-between.

My hard work on this day off was to mulch my garden. It's not done. One of my neighbors had 2 1/2 pallets of Scott's 'Nature Scapes Classic Black' mulch delivered last year. Even at that quantity, it was over $5 per bag. She had at least a pallet left over, and gave bags of it to anyone that would take them. I was pleasantly surprised to find 8 bags stacked on my driveway one day when I got home. I dragged them under my deck for the winter, and today was the day to drag them back. Did I mention I don't have a working wheelbarrow? It was hard work. Unfortunately, I'm at least 8 bags short, and I've be been eying the bags in another neighbor's back yard. He is not any kind of gardener. He spends his time digging rocks and making piles of them. I'll have to take a picture sometime. All the neighbors talk about his rocks. My plan is to ask him if I can have his mulch so it will match what I've put down, and that I will buy him new mulch. I don't think he'll mind. It's what I'm counting on. Anyway, it's amazing how good this very dark mulch looks. I could sit here for 72 hours, just looking at it.

I went for a 'small bowel scan' this morning. I had a kind of crampy pain in my abdomen for about 5 weeks, and this is the latest test to see if something is wrong. I've felt fine for at least the last 3 weeks. I had a CT scan done and that was fine. I had an exam by my gynecologist who found nothing wrong. I saw a gastrointestinal doctor last week who started me on some medicines, and today I had the scan. I had to drink 2 bottles of disgusting Barium. Yuck. Think of 2 16-oz glasses of white Milk of Magnesia doctored up to taste cloyingly sweet. The radiologist took a picture before I drank it, right after I drank it, then every 20 minutes for an hour. She was tracking the progress of the Barium moving through my system. (She told me it could take from 1 to 4 hours) I asked if I could see the image on the screen. It was amazing. You could clearly see my stomach, large and small intestines, pelvis, etc. The doctor came in at the end and took more 'spot' x-rays. Then I went home. I've been drinking water like a fish to try and flush that stuff out of me. I'll call the doctor on Friday for results. I hope everything is normal.

Well, it's time for me to clean up. My tools and trash are just lying where I left them. There's no 'maid service' around here.