While I got in a fair bit of gaming this weekend… it was far from the major mission at hand.  We had decided some weeks back that over spring break we would rehabilitate our lawn.  We had been putting this off for some time as evidenced by the mountain of yard waste that is now sitting waiting for the city to pick it up.  Our city has two options for lawn waste the first being get a red bin and then in essence pay rent on it all year round.  The other option is to go to a local QuikTrip store and buy some very pricey special bags emblazoned with the city name on them that denote that the it is going to some sort of a yard waste recycling plant.

Unfortunately I just looked up on the city website….  and it appears that yard waste collection will not resume until April 9th meaning these bags will be hanging out on the side of my house a little longer than I expected.  It was a pretty weekend however and allowed us to get things under control before the real growth seasons starts.  The funny thing about this is you can see all of the leaves that make up this mess…  were gathered in a lawn with no trees.  Our back yard seems to be the catch all for all of the houses that do have trees.

The real mission of the weekend however was to reconstitute our back patio that opens out from our bedroom.  This is my wife’s happy place and I wanted her to at least be able to spend some of her spring break out there reading.  This was in fact something she managed to do a good chunk of Saturday given that I took Friday off in which we did most of the work.  I will admit I like hanging out here too but mostly in the evenings when we have a very long shadow hanging out and covering the patio area.  I am rather fond of hanging out and listening to the wind chimes while watching the birbs.

This year I do plan on spending a good deal of time out here either playing the Switch or 2DS XL, both of which are really solid outdoor gaming options for me.  I had originally hoped that the WiiU would have been functional for outdoor gaming but unfortunately the receiver was not strong enough to penetrate the door to the bedroom where I had it hooked up for awhile.  I am still grumpy about how lousy the range on the handheld unit is, but with the advent of the Switch it was essentially what I was hoping the WiiU was going to be.

While it is still a little early to set out the “flower babies” we did set up a feeder for the birbs and within a day our backyard was humming with activity.    We’ve seen a nesting pair of mourning doves pictured in my hastily zoomed in phone camera shot, a pair of cardinals, a male blue jay and a myriad of smaller birds that I don’t know the names of.   We had a fungus infect our two red tipped photinias last year and while we attempted to fight it with some spray…. we lost the battle and ultimately had to take out the two dead bushes that had grown into the size of small trees.

I was afraid this lose of cover would decrease the amount of activity we saw in our back yard, but weirdly enough it seems to have actually increased the amount of time the birds are out and roaming around visibly.  The focus seems to have shifted away from hanging out in the bushes to hanging out on our back deck, which would probably a problem…  if we actually used that back deck.  It is way too far removed from the house to really be convenient and you have to cross over to the other side of the pool to even get up on it.  So as a result we tend to mostly forget it exists other than our old set of lawn furniture being up on it.

A good chunk of the weekend was spent happily watching the birbs hanging out in our yard and also watching them completely drain one of the two feeders we have this year.  I can already tell that we need to find two things this year…  firstly a proper bird bath so they have a place to get a drink or wash off.  Secondly we need some sort of a ground level vessel for water because we traditionally have bunnies in our yard quite a bit given that we are not likely to chase them off.  Nothing depresses me more than having to fish a dead animal out of the pool because they were trying to get a drink.  So my hope is to place something else to get a drink from more prominently… and I will just fill it when I am watering the flowers in the evening.  All in all though, happy to have the patio back open for business.

This is going to be a really odd post but one that I sorta feel like I want to make.  I have a deep and personal bond with Mister Rogers Neighborhood that I am not entirely sure if I can put into words.  I grew up the only child of two very busy parents with no other children within easy access distance to me because we lived just far enough out of the city limits to make everything awkward.  For the most part I say I was raised by my grandmother, because she was my babysitter and playmate as a child.  The problem with that however is that she was the anchor of a very busy rural household, which meant there were larger swaths of the day where she was out doing chores.  I mean this is a woman I can regularly remember going out to chopped/split wood for the stove to keep the house warm while grandpa was out tending to the cattle.

As a result there were large swaths of the day where I was left to my own devices, and essentially had to learn how to keep myself entertained.  I was the first person in my family to get cable television… and even then I did not get that until I moved to college so as far as programming went I was limited to the four over the air networks.  It was at an early age that I developed an affinity for PBS or the Public Broadcasting Service and regularly would sit there in the floor of my grandparents living room soaking up everything I could find while doodling and inventing nonsense.  Without a doubt the only show I never missed however was Mister Rogers Neighborhood, because it had a way of bringing me into that world.

I felt like I was friends with Mister Rogers, Handyman Negry, Mister McFeely, or Lady Aberlin…  as well as X the Owl, Henrietta the Cat or Daniel the Lion.  For thirty minutes I was sucked into this other world where not everyone looked the same as me but still managed to get along perfectly.  This was deeply important to my upbringing because I lived in what you might say was a quietly prejudiced world and thought Mister Rogers neighborhood it allowed me to build up a bit of an immunity to having any of those thoughts root deeply in my brain.  His mission to drill into our brains that we were all the same inside and that we should celebrate the interesting differences is something that served me well and that I have tried to never betray.

Then the other night after a normal day in the office, I sat down to start doing what I sorta refer to as “checking into the world”.  One of the things that crossed past my eyes was the above trailer for a new movie about the life of Fred Rogers called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” and as I sat there watching it…  I started tearing up to the point of just water pouring out of my eyes.  Hell as I sit here writing this post this morning I am teary eyed as well.  It is impossible to put into word accurately how much this man meant to me… and how much the show Mister Rogers Neighborhood did.  He took what was an otherwise solitary childhood where I sat alone for hours at a time finding ways to entertain myself…   into a constant voyage of discovery as I anxiously awaited the moment when the show would be on again and we could do more interesting things together.

I made a comment to this effect the other night on Twitter and my friend Gryph commented that there was a Mister Rogers Neighborhood marathon going on over on Twitch.  This was a night when my wife had gone to Dallas and I was ultimately waiting up for her to get home safely before going to bed.  So from about 10:30 until around midnight I sat there watching old episodes of the show reliving moments from my childhood.  By the time my wife got home I had to explain why my eyes were so teary because there were so many moments that just hit me in the gut.  Example the above image is from when Lady Aberlin forgot to come pick up Daniel Lion for a party, and he thought she didn’t love him anymore.

These were important lessons to talk about with kids, and to help them work through complex feelings of frustration and abandonment…  giving us ammunition for dealing with those things when we experienced them later in life.  I am far from normal, but I feel like I am a better person because of the lessons we learned every day after school from Mister Rogers and the crew.  The role Betty Aberlin played has to be highlighted and appreciated because she had this way of treating those puppets as though they were the most real people in the world with their own complex needs.  Without her and her presence in the land of Make Believe it would have been harder to get sucked into the world because of the way she carried the interactions with the puppeteers.

Watch live video from MisterRogers on www.twitch.tvIf you were too young to experience Mister Rogers Neighborhood… which is a realistic concern given that I am 41 almost 42 and was part of the prime viewership…  I highly suggest you check it out.  There is something magical and timeless about the experience and it has been interesting to see the outpouring of goodwill and support on twitch chat.  This is normally a community that can be offensively toxic, but instead everyone is reveling together in just how pure and good the experience is.  There was a mystical quality in the primitive nature of the show and its extremely low production budget…  but in many ways that also is what sells the experience and makes it so easy to let your imagination fill in the gaps.  Excuse me while I try and find something to dry my eyes.