Day 215, Waking up with the feeling of a heavy chest



Good morning, are you up yet?

 With clean sheets on my bed and a beautiful Saturday morning I felt great, but I woke up with the feeling of something very heavy on my chest.  I had two cats looking at me wondering why I wasn't up yet and more importantly, why have I not feed them.  It's nice to feel wanted, but it would feel even nicer to be able to sleep in and wake up on your own schedule.

Needless to say with two faces staring at me and pushing the air out of my lungs, it was time to get up and feed them.

It was a beautiful morning, so I let the chickens out first thing so they could enjoy the day to its fullest.  I have a lot of yard work to do and some maintenance to get caught up on after the week long spell of snow.  I have 4 skyrocket junipers that were flattened by the weight of the snow and I need to rope them back into position.


Snow flattened Junipers


Looking at the flatten junipers, I wondered how I was going to get them back in position.  They were once 10' tall and now they leaning over.  I figured it was going to take lots of rope, a tall 2x6 for leverage and my truck to get them back in place.  I started with the juniper most flattened and with my truck and the  2x6, I was able to pull it upright and then tie it off to the  one Juniper that did not fall over.  I continued this process with the other two junipers until they were all up right and then I used a heavy nylon rope to rope them all together.  Working with Juniper is a scratchy job and despite my long sleeves my forearms got scratched up a lot.  I'm allergic to juniper so I washed the scratches and took a allergy pill.


10' junipers tied back up.


It was a very nice day despite being somewhat overcast and I got a lot of work done around the yard.  I was also able to take down the horse fence in the front yard, rolling up the barbed wire, electric fence line and pulling up the posts.  Its nice having the horses in the front pasture during winter, but I like it when the fence is gone and front lawn just blends in with the field.

At 6:30pm I met up my friends, Wanda, Conan, Bruce and Mary Ann to go to a comedy improve night in Bend.  I had no idea what to expect, but figured it would be something new and different.  The attendance was sparse and there were a lot of children.  Needless to say they had to cater to their level and it was rather painful to sit through.  I couldn't help but think it was an hour and a half of my life that I would never get back.


A night of Improv...Ughh!


After the program we drove back to Redmond and went to a yogurt store where you select frozen yogert and then put on different toppings.  I had vanilla yogurt with crushed Heath bars, Butterfingers, hot chocolate and caramel poured on top.  Following that we went back to Wanda and Conan's to play wii and enjoy the rest of the evening.

I got home around midnight and my arms were burning from the Juniper scratches.  I put on some scratch ointment and went to bed.  At 2:30am I woke up with my screaming in pain and a fever.  I wondered if I needed to drive myself to the ER.  I took some Tylenol and a prescription allergy pill and went back to bed.  With in about 40 minutes I decided I was going to live and fell back to to sleep. 

Moral of the story, stay away from juniper.