Up until this weekend the jeans were still presentable at, say, Home Depot. Hilda even thought they looked kinda cool, with the fading and frayed holes developed through years of wear.

So they went on for the weekend garden chores - getting the plants into the ground that had leaped into our cart in the HD garden center, then major repairs on the irrigation lines so we could hit the road without returning to find everything crispy. Most of the day yesterday was spent in the jeans, now with a larger tear in the left knee, hunting down and finally repairing an elusive leak. This involved splicing in new sections of tubing, walking up the hill to turn the line on, then inspecting to find that another leak is now creating a fountain someplace else. So it's another trudge back up the hill to find more tools and materials, then back down to attack the leak once more.

I love this kind of stuff. Walking to the workshop to get a tool, then back to the project, on the way enjoying the spring sounds of finches, sparrows, titmice ... and the sights of plants budding out, popping up and blooming, the gentle wind chime, our little waterfall. I suppose I am a bit of a sight - an old guy trudging around in ragged clothes, stopping to scratch a dog's ears who has wandered over from the neighbor to say hello, or standing somewhere in the workshop or garden, muttering to himself while trying to recall what purpose brought him there.

By late in the day the leak was repaired, new line laid. But it had meant a lot of scrabbling under the rock rose, and digging in dirt and mud, all the while becoming dirty, sweaty, jeans worn even more, a bit off blood from scratches here and there ... i.e., pretty scruffy. So I was not too surprised when I looked up from making a final inspection down along the street where I had been pulling some weeds and scrabbling a few cans out from under the junipers, to see one of our community security folks had slowed to check me out. "What is this, an aluminum-collecting vagrant has somehow breached our defenses? Horrors!".

He grinned and waved as he drove on by, realizing it was just that old guy in Lot 95.