My dog, Javi, loves the sun. He has found a spot of it this morning on the carpet, in the living room, and he is languishing in it.

My blood sugar reading, upon rising, at 9am, this morning was 172. This is high. It shouldn't be higher than 140, at this point in the day. I woke up around 2am and fixed me a plate of chicken salad. I ate a whole breast doused heavily in mayonaise, and then I went outside and gourged on some peanuts; this is probably why it is high this early in the day.

The lawn work that I have been doing at Lovey Dovey's house has not only been making me very sore, but it has increased my hunger, also. I had basically given up middle of the night trips to the refrigerator, until last night. The chicken was one of those kind that you find under a heating lamp at the grocery store, all cooked and juicy, waiting for you to cut right into it, without having to pull plastic off of it, clean it, season it, and cook it. If I had had to do all that in order to make me some chicken salad, I probably would have gone back to bed instead.

I love the delis out here at the country grocery stores. Some days they server meatloaf, other days it is stuffed peppers and, yesterday, it was spaghetti with cheese toast. You can get you two or three vegetables with it, whichever you want to pay for.

Yesterday, I told the lady wearing the funny cap and plastic gloves, as she was serving up my spaghetti, that "this is my home cooking." She laughed.

"Yup," I said, my girlfriend cooked for the first two months of our relationship; now she don't cook no more." She laughed and said, "well, she was just trying to lure you in." I laughed.

Now let me state for the record, and before girlfriend reads this and gets all pissed off, that I don't mind eating out or having food delivered to the house; so my girlfriend is not a louse. Trust that I am well-fed, one way or another!

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What time table are we really on, but the one that God sets for us? This thought came to mind, as I looked around and calculated what had to be done to complete this week of landscaping, that I have found myself in, here at my girlfriend's house.

Mainly, to close out the deal, I have piles of branches, leaves and dirt to pick up. I enjoyed creaint the pile more than I take to eliminating them. If love was here, I would try to take her into doing this part of the gig, like I was Huckleberry Finn, and her picking up the piles was some deal that we had made. Of course, I could just leave the piles and head back to the city, but that would make the job, and somehow, me also, incomplete.

Today, on the phone, I told my son what I had been doing all week, and how, at his age, I hated doing this kind of crap. My son said that he, too, at his age, didn't much care for it, so I know that I won't be able to talk him into making the hour and fifteen minute drive from city to country to come help me put these piles in lawn bags.

My dog Morisson is eating whole peanuts, today, shell and all. Gee, I wonder if I'm feeding him enough in the mornings. I throw the whole peanut to him, and he mostly catches them with his mouth, then sulks off to work on them. He seems to chew the whole peanut a bit, then spit it out, root through it for the peanut, and then go back and eat the shell. He won't eat strawberries, though. Javi will eat them though; whole strawberries with the green part cut off, half strawberries with the green part cut off, and he'll even eat the green part, if you toss it to him. Like I've said before, Javi is an eater!!

If I was doing this landscaping dog, errrr job, for money by the hour, somebody would have been on my ass, long ago, for going too slow, or because they were trying to figure out a way not to pay me at all.

The beauty of this gig, is that there is no cash involved; I'm doing this work because I love the woman who owns the house that all this landscaping is attached to. What if we break up? Well, I had this week didn't I, this beautiful week in the sun and in the shade doing something that I always thought that I would hate doing; and I have loved it! I cannot pay this woman back for this and I don't see us breaking up anytime soon. In a day less than two weeks, we will have been together for a year, and its been a long time, baby, since anyone has put up with me for that long.