Father's Day
After waking up with the rest of the house this morning at 7am – they were heading to a football tournament – I arrived downstairs to find Miss 13 waiting for me in the living room with several presents.
“Happy Father’s Day, Dad!”
One by one the rest of the family congregated in the lounge, in various states of undress, and sat rubbing their eyes while I struggled with wrapping paper, sticky tape, and cards. Minutes later the whole occasion came to an abrupt halt because they had to find football kit, boots, fill water bottles, and pack snacks.
My Father’s Day was largely spent on my own in the garden – pottering around, hacking back undergrowth, sawing branches off trees, and slowly turning the jungle at the end of the garden back into a meadow of sorts.
After working for a few hours, the sun had climbed high in the sky, burned the clouds off, and was doing it’s best to cook me. I remembered the beer in the fridge, and looked at my watch – 10:30am. I texted a friend, and asked if 10:30 was too early to drink beer. I had been up out there for several hours, remember (a pathetic defence, but I’ll use it).
I made it to lunchtime without resorting to beer before heading indoors, eating leftovers, and finally opening the fridge. Let’s just say we no longer have any beer, but we do have a garden that’s starting to look somewhat presentable. Maybe I should get a t-shirt with “will do gardening for beer” written on it.
This evening it’s too hot to do much of anything. After everybody else got home they stripped to swimsuits and ran around the garden with an impressive array of waterpistols. We ate salad in the garden, and have been sitting indoors since, purely to get out of the humid, sticky heat outside.
Apparently this weather is going to continue into the week. I don’t even want to imagine what the office might be like in the morning.