The sun is out, the sky is blue. . . in It's a llittle llazy over here

. . . and you can practically hear the weeds starting to grow.

One of the things about being all domesticated now is that I have a garden. This garden hates me. Everything in it hates me.

The roses hate me. They’ve been trying to cut a major artery ever since we moved in.

The fence hates me. It goes green overnight every year and is starting to fall apart.

The weeds hate me. They grow like mad and if you try to kill them it just makes them angrier.

The lawn hates me. At least, what’s left of it. When we moved in, we had a patch of grass made up mostly of moss and weeds. Now, we have some grass and bare patches all over the place where I’ve put down moss & weed killer only to discover that there wasn’t really anything else left. Planting new grass seems to have no effect.

Our few non-weed plants hate me. They die out of spite.

The slugs hate me. If any of our plants decide not to die, the slugs come for them.

Other than that, I’m looking forward to another summer of fighting the grass. First world problems and all that. . . .

My annual review is on Friday and how bloody wonderful it will be to have it over with for another year. Then I get another round of ‘how do we get you to manager’, to which the answer is, “If I wanted to be a manager, I’d already be one. If it was difficult, half the managers around here wouldn’t be able to do it.”

I won’t say that last part. But it’s more or less true; the defining character of getting a promotion out of my grade is motivation, not talent, and I have not a great amount of the former. In a few years I may have to revisit that, because the money would be useful and I can’t ignore that forever when I have a mortgage and bills to pay, but for now. . . not so much.

No.

I saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier the other day. My much delayed thoughts are that it’s an OK film, but if you’re going to call your film ‘The Winter Soldier’, you probably shouldn’t end up with a film where the Winter Solider is more or less irrelevant.

Seriously, you could remove the Winter Soldier from that film completely and lose nothing. You could get rid of that entire sub-plot, replace him with a generic bad-ass assassin henchman number 1 and it makes almost no difference whatsoever to the film. Call me crazy, but I was kind of expecting him to be, you know, important to the plot?

Meh. Madness.

Yes.