(Sunday Paper, Year V, Issue 28)

I’m back!

I know, you like it better when the guest posters are here.

I am nothing if not in tune with what’s popular.

So in an effort to win you over again in this, my first week back at the wheel of the Sunday Paper, I’m going to pander to what’s popular.

What’s MOST popular, in fact…

I’m going to make this Sunday Paper post Hamilton-themed.

Had you already figured that out from the title of the post?

If you did, good for you. Very astute. So let me catch you up on things using Hamilton song titles as headers. And, yes, most of these are going to be a stretch. (Just like the title, which obviously should be ‘What’d You Miss?’ while I was living life to the fullest and you were reading posts written by a dog.)

Helpless

I think we should probably start with a hair update.

In non-pandemic times, I usually get a haircut once a month. I should say, in pre-pandemic times, I was a once-a-month hair cut customer. I prefer my hair short, and it grows fast.

I think the pandemic has proven that I can go a little longer than a month, but I still would prefer not to go too far beyond that.

But the reason I mention all that is because for Father’s Day I got a hair clipper thing.

My last haircut pre-pandemic was somewhere in early March. Definitely before the last show I did, which was March 14, and probably in that first week of March even. And then photo date evidence shows the next one - the do-it-at-home disaster that caused me to wear a hat for a while immediately afterwards - was on April 26th.

After Father’s Day, with the new clipper, Kathy helped give my head a nice even, clean shave - that happened on June 23rd. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than the other one. (We’re a step better than helpless with the haircuts now.)

And, as you see, we’re pushing two months on both of these haircuts. The next one is due before the end of the summer…I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Satisfied

By far the most satisfying aspect of the past 17 weeks (!) has been my newfound talent in yard work. I’m not ready to call my thumb green quite yet, and I’ll write about this in more detail some other time (you knew I would), but I’ve dedicated myself to the yard in a new way this year and as I’ve told you before I’m super proud of the way it looks right now and it’s been fun watching the new grass grow (it looks so great when I mow it!) and I even pushed my luck and planted tomatoes and cucumbers.

This week, as you see in that picture above, we started to see some tomatoes bloom. Right out of nowhere. So crazy. It’s ahead of schedule, so I don’t quite know what to do about that - I wasn’t expecting tomatoes until the end of August. (Cucumbers in mid-August.) So I’ll be keeping a close eye on things and you better believe when we have a red tomato on there you’ll know about it.

Take A Break

As you also probably know, this week I celebrated my birthday. Coming on the heels of the 4th of July weekend celebration, as it so often does, I kind of took too much time to myself this week and fell behind on some work. So the rest of July might be busy…but it sure was a nice week. (Oh! Did you see a picture of the cake Kathy made for my birthday? I’m posting it here just in case you didn’t.)

My Shot

Actually, I didn’t get any shots.

But I have seen both my doctor and my dentist since the last time I wrote here and both of those visits went fine, but they both were incredibly weird with everything that’s going on. I will say the doctor’s visit was far more tense than the dentist. Other than slight differences the trip to the dentist’s office was almost business as usual.

The Story Of Tonight

Actually, it’s the story of Thursday and Saturday nights. And sometimes Fridays.

I mentioned this back in my alphabetical post early on in quarantine: Every Saturday night I Zoom with my friends and we catch up and check in and it’s great and makes me think it’s embarrassing that we didn’t do this before there was a pandemic. On occasional Friday nights I do a similar thing with family.

But - this is something I haven’t written about yet - on Thursdays now I do a Strat-O-Matic baseball game/league over Zoom with a friend and a couple of his friends and it’s so much fun. (And I’m also performing quite well, which makes it more fun.) So it’s nice to have a little bit of routine a few days out of the week.

What Comes Next?

Well, I’ll keep you posted. We’re having a fine time here at home and are taking advantage of this summer lull in cases near here to carefully try to get out while we can…because my money is on not having that same luxury come fall/winter. We’ll see.

But there are other updates - including a big family one, now that I think about it - that I’ll have to get to…but we have all of the rest of summer for that.

For now, I’ll leave you with this: I’ve seen how all of you go crazy for the posts by Kathy and the girls. (And the dog.) So help me - if you don’t start showing me that same kind of love for the Sunday Paper……

(I’m just kidding. I always appreciate you reading. Thank you.)

It’s nice to be back.

One Last Time

Oh, I should mention - we also watched Hamilton, in case you couldn’t tell. Thoroughly enjoyed it, and my honest assessment is that it was so good it kind of paralyzed me creatively because I’ll never do anything that good. But it was cool to see it after only listening to the soundtrack and to see the visual pieces that went along with the music. Definitely not how we expected to be seeing it for the first time, that’s for sure - but I’m looking forward to watching it again….and again.