You wanna talk about adventure and excitement then the person you need to talk to is my cousin Earl...

Yesirree, it's been a full weekend of adventure and excitement round Chez Juice. We're wild people, I tell you. Example: We spent nigh on our entire Saturday mulching the flowerbeds. No, I'm serious, we did. Top that, Ashton Kutcher!

Now when you need mulch, the recommended thing to do is to buy it from some guy with a front-loader who sits around in an abandoned lot next to some giant piles of mulch. It's the best way, really. There were a couple of varieties of mulch, but we wanted the super dark black mulch. It was $20 per front-loader scoop, so we handed the man $40 and he scooped us up a big ol' pile of mulch.

Did I mention we don't own a truck nor a flatbed trailer with which to haul mulch? Oh, cause we don't. Instead we'd brought shovels and our plan was to shovel our massive pile of mulch into the back of the wife's Honda Element. Now, the annoying thing was that I'd spent the better part of an hour cleaning out and vacuuming the wife's Honda just the day before, because it had become what we in sweet-hubbie business term "reisty" with filth. We're talking piles of old paper plates from breakfasts on the go; greasy fast-food bags left over from Biscuit World, just waiting for a dog to come along and shred in an attempt to get at the ghosts of bacon past; herds of junk mail and paper piles and stray Kleenexes that somehow failed to be deposited in her gear-shift mounted trash bag; plus a whole winter's worth of dried mud and dirt. And I didn't even have to be asked to clean all this junk out--that's how sweet a hubbie I am, not to mention a wild man, much liken unto the levels of wild contained within one Mr. Steve "Wild Dog" Wampler. The wife had been ever-so-grateful that I'd cleaned her car. She even shed a few tears at the sweetness of it. However, we were still going to fill the back of her Element up with mulch, all the same, and I had to admit it was the only logical way we could haul that amount of mulch back to the house.

In anticipation of the quantity of mulch we'd guessed we'd need to haul, we took the back seats out and covered the floor with both a large sheet of cardboard and then a drop cloth taped to the sides. However, it was such a truly massive pile of mulch that it soon breached the levees we'd set up and spilled into every crack, crevice and compartment of the back seat and then spilled into the front seat all the way up to the parking break. This we hauled home and began distributing into our mulchless flower beds.

By 8p, or so, we had the beds weeded and mulched and everything looked particularly nice. We were even able to save ourselves some hassle in the Element-cleaning department by pulling the drop cloth and most of the remaining mulch out, leaving behind only a reasonable amount that I'll probably go vacuum up, some day. The mulchy stench was still pretty strong in there, though, so we opted to leave all the doors of the car open overnight so so it could air out in the driveway.

At 3 a.m. I was awakened when the door to our bedroom was slammed shut by a gust of wind blowing through the open windows of our house. I could hear rain and wind outside that sounded fairly heavy. I arose and went to close some of the windows so that the rain didn't blow through them. After a minute or so of being up, I saw the wife walking through the hall, as well.

"The car's still open," she said. Only then did I remember that not only were all the doors of her car open, but that the windows were too. I offered to go close it up, but she'd already retrieved an umbrella from the garage and was on her way out. I later learned that she'd woken up around the same time I had, heard the rain, saw me get up and had thought I was sweetly going to close her windows. After I clearly hadn't a minute later, though, she realized I was half-asleep and had not remembered and got up to do it herself. She had unfortunately, not taken her keys and I knew she would not be able to close the power windows without them. I dashed and got mine and walked them out to her in the rain.

In the morning, we saw that our black mulch had been washed clean of its dye and was now just bark-colored mulch, except beneath the overhang of the roof, where it remained black. Still looks a darn sight better than the bare dirt and weeds we'd had before.