Memorial Day With Dad

My Father has been visiting us this week. It's great having him around. He knows stuff about things.

On Memorial Day we attacked my over-grown back yard. The former occupants had a real show place, with plenty of hedges, flower beds, bushes, shrubs, tress and even some green plant they call "grass" living in abundance.

Well, we zeroed in on the monstrously-overgrown hedges. They were so bad that I had to use a pair of those "limb loppers" to cut through the center of them! I managed to hack those babies down to an almost-uniform height.

My neighbor pointed out that much of the vegetation living in my yard is actually poison ivy! YIPES! We took a run to the HOME DEPOT and bought some Roundup Ivy-Killer.

We also bought a sack of cold-pack asphalt patch for two really deadly craters in my driveway. And some coil stock to form a piece of trim for over the back door. And...

Without my Dad's lifetime of "how-to" smarts in the neighborhood it wouldn't have occurred to me that a mere mortal could actually fix or maintain any of this stuff!

While I've inherited almost none of his Mr. Fix-It genes, his love of language peculiarities seems to have been passed on.

He mentioned that, in second grade, he was fascinated by the name of a girl in his class. It was Sarah Pach, whose last name was pronounced "pox." Number one, the fact that "Pach" would be said as "Pox" caught his attention. Number two, he noticed that if he switched it up a bit, "Sarah Pach" became "pair of sox!"

That's my Dad!