The long weekend is ending

Keith is home, the trailer is unpacked and parked. Marty has cleaned up and gone to dinner with friends. I finished almost everything on my weekend to-do list, even though it rained for two days.

Friday night I went to dinner with Helene McNeill, a longtime friend, and with her new cellphone she took the photos. (Well I took the one of her.) I think when she messes with it a while she'll figure out ways to make higher resolution. These are in a cool booth/enclave at The Range Cafe on Wyoming. We had SO much fun we didn't notice when we were the only ones there, and it had been so crowded we had waited for a table.

The food portrait was the spinach artichoke dip. It had cheese bread to dip. It was art. It looked better in real life, so use your color-correcting imagination.

I've been excavating my side yard. Really, I'm taking out rock and sifting out glass and nails and slaggish old pieces of concrete and stucco. And when I've gotten that far, I go down to the native gravel, because it was once an arroyo, and then the decent clean gravel is becoming a kind of ramp on a curb for turning around... and the big rocks are filling up a hole in a vacant lot. And the trash is going incrementally to the dump.

I found some shells. I'll put a photo of them someday. I think I'll find more. They're teensy. I've seen them in fossil-rocks, so when I have a photo I'm sure someone will recognize them. I've found various this'n'that, but nothing that's not recognizeable fairly new stuff that's been dumped there since the 1970's. Nothing archeological.

BUT... Helene's an archeologist so she got SO excited that I was able to tell where the arroyo had run and that I was finding things, that she has brought some *real* archeologist's tools for me to use. A screen with a frame, and a special trowel and a shovel/scoop. THAT is wonderful. It says made in England and it holds a lot of stuff ("loose" is what it picks up, but as I live in a desert and not a peat bog, pretty much everything here is loose).

Keith stepped on some of my corn plants and so I didn't like him at ALL for a little while, and I considered divorce, but we have a bunch of seed corn and when my adrenaline was gone and I had cried a bit, and he had apologized (a bit), and I remembered what a long weekend (five day campout) he'd had and that his leg was hurt and I had planted the corn where he keeps his poles and rebar anyway... then I decided to cheer up and stay married.

The end.