Today was one of those perfect weather days of which we get all too few. Clear skies, only a slight breeze, and temperatures in the upper 60’s. Just the kind of a day for working outside in the yard.

Nina worked one of the raised garden beds. She was busy loosening up the soil, pulling out the weeds, and getting the bed ready to be planted.

Meanwhile, I mowed the back yard. One time as I came by she looked up and said, “I thought this was Adam’s curse, not mine!” I offered to get out the little rototiller but she declined the offer. This bed did get planted this afternoon. The other raised bed pictured behind her will have to wait for another day.

Last year the tomato plants took up a huge amount of space in the raised beds. This year she’s decided to hang the plants upside down so I spent much of the afternoon making the apparatus to do that. I didn’t quite get finished before I had to shower and get cleaned up to to go a wedding reception. Pictures will have to wait until Monday when I get it finished.

As I left the Novell cafeteria yesterday I noticed this sign on the door into the credit union. It was big enough to call attention to itself. After reading the sign I decided to take a picture as it was definitely blog material. It got me thinking about the semantics of the sign and the phrase definition difference between “removing” some item of clothing and “taking off” some item of clothing. I have tried to do some searches on the Internet to no avail. After looking up both words on InfoPlease, I’ve pretty much decided that the slight difference between the two words isn’t very big.

The real heart of the matter is that, after reading the sign, walking into the credit union wearing a ski mask will probably result in the police being called. That’s a good thing. If I was in the lobby of a bank or credit union and someone came in wearing a ski mask, I’d probably dive for cover.

So why is the sign on the door? Inquiring minds want to know. Did they have an issue in one of their branches where someone came in wearing a ski mask, the police were called, and the person was just going skiing somewhere and needed to transact some normal customer business first? It still doesn’t compute in my brain. I’d think all normal people would know that wearing a ski mask into a bank might be received with some unwelcome police attention.

Our busy day was to end with us going to a wedding reception. We decided to first go to Applebees for dinner and then go to the reception for desert. That turned out to be a very good plan. We got to Applebees about 5 p.m. and had a nice dinner. We were finished and out of there by 5:45 p.m. The reception was not far from the restaurant and was scheduled from 6 – 8 p.m. We arrived in the Church parking lot with plenty of time to spare.

“Let me play a game,” Nina asked. Normally when I’m just sitting around waiting, I’ll pull out my Treo phone which has a set of Solitare games installed. At the restaurant Nina asked me if I was going to play FreeCell. I told her no, that if I was to play anything, it would be Yukon. She had never played that game before, so I gave her my cell phone and she did fairly well on the game before losing. She wanted to know if there were other games. I told her there were, along with a couple that I’ve never won. She switched over to Pyramid and lost. We had dinner, arrived at the Church with time to spare, and she wanted to try Pyramid once again. Several tries later, she still hadn’t won. The perfect losing record remains intact. I think I need to get a Solitare game pack installed on her phone so I can have mine back when we’re just sitting around and waiting….