Curmudgeon and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: Part 1

The best part of having kids is reading them stories. My favorite was Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. If your kids (or grand kids) are of the right age, read it to them.

Like Alexander, I’ve had several consecutive bad days. In my defense, it’s not through any particular failing of my own. I’m sensitive to “air crud” and the air quality has been shit. It’s so bad I missed some work. Missing work infuriates me but there’s nothing I can do.

It doesn’t help that this is 2020 and everyone is insane.

“I’m mildly sick.”

“OMG, COVID… you’re doomed!”

“It’s just bad air. I’ll be fine when the weather pattern changes.”

“Eleventy billion cases have been detected, every biker that went to Sturgis is dead, this is the worst thing that has ever happened.”

“No, this is not the worst thing that’s ever happened. People get sick. I will recover when the wind shifts.”

A lot of folks like to roll in panic. Their issues are beyond my control.

I crawled into bed to wait it out. Even after a few days, I still wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I’d have liked to stay in bed longer but I was faced with a task I couldn’t avoid. A contractor was coming to my homestead. He needed a specific area cleared of brush. Reluctantly, I started working.

It was one of those cascading failure days. To begin with, the tractor was low on fuel. I have a “fleet” of “pre-California” gas cans. I keep them labeled (lest I pour chainsaw mix into a diesel tractor!). I thought I was out of tractor fuel and dreaded the drive to town to fill up a can. Lo and behold I found a full can labeled “off road diesel”. Suspiciously, I’d forgotten to write down the date. I have no recollection of filling it. For all I know it’s a million years old. Also, the vent cover was missing (an artifact of living in the slowly declining, post-common sense, world where a properly vented gas can is hard to replace).

Did water get in there? C’mon Curmudgeon, there’s no need to be paranoid.  I filled up the tractor. Five minutes later the dash’s idiot light for the fuel filter told me I’d done wrong. I sussed out the location of the filter and, predictably, slimed my hand with a few pints of water / fuel mix while draining it. At least it didn’t stall out.

The highlight of the day was when I hitched my brush hog to the tractor without drama. (I bought a brush deck last year and I’m still getting the hang of mounting it.) The 3-point hitch was a bit of a PITA last year. Either it’s finally broken in or I learned how to do it better, because it was a 5-minute task instead of the usual half hour of cussing.

The brush deck is a crude, heartless, brutal machine. It ate a mountain of thistles like Godzilla stomping Tokyo. I was glad to see them go. Usually I spray to keep them in check but I didn’t this spring. As weed are wont to do, they’d turned the dial to eleven. That said, they made great habitat for goldfinches.

They’re pretty little buggers; the finches, not the thistles.

After that I was on my hands and knees pulling some thick roots. I grabbed a root with my bare hand and BLAM! I was nailed by a billion tiny shredded thistle bits. It felt less like a thistle prick and more like rolling in molecular level glass shards! That my hand was already coated in diesel probably didn’t help.

I’m either dumb or tough because I got the root pulled, the area raked, and the job done. I went inside to rest but got distracted and started scribbling out the next Squirrels chapter. My stinging, wretched hand didn’t grip the pen well so I swapped to a pretentious quill pen I keep for just such an occasion. A quill pen is a bit easier on the hand.

Quill pens mostly serve to get ink on everything; which is exactly what happened. All of a sudden, there was blue ink everywhere! I saved the kitchen table but got ink all over my hand.

When trying to wash away all that ink, every damn thistle wound stung like fire. Ouch!

Mrs. Curmudgeon checked in to see what was causing the commotion.

“My hand is coated in tractor fuel, shredded by prickers, and dyed blue.” I whined.

I thought of Alexander. I’m moving to Australia.