A little behind. And lonely.

I have not been much in the mood to water the garden, but I thought I ought to today. So I did that this morning while the air was still cool.

I start from the spindly tree next to the fountain at the back of the house. I work my way to the bushes at the side of the house, with flowers like red flames, and end up in front by the brown maroon plant that always looks like it's dying of thirst, though I've been told it's not. When I'm through, I coil the yellow garden hose into a neat round pile and sweep the driveway for about five minutes. Longer than that, I start to get hot from the rapidly warming air rising from the ground.

It was while I was watering the potted palms in the front garden that I noticed dog droppings on the grass, already white and brittle. I'm not sure if it means the dog did it three days ago and I never noticed, or that in Malaysia dog droppings dry really fast and it happened yesterday. This development is very annoying, because it means I must now be vigilant against wild dogs using my garden as their dumping ground. And I really don't want to add any more items to the list of things I already have to do, some of which I haven't been consistently doing -- like raking leaves, and collecting sweet wrappers that blow into the garden from the hands of neighbourhood children.

I had to get rid of the dog droppings. There's an old newspaper in the car on the floor of the passenger seat that I've been meaning to throw out, with a photo of Sharlinie on the front page. I went to the kitchen, put on a pair of 3M gloves, took a page out of the old newspaper (not Sharlinie's page) and used it to wrap the droppings. Then I put the wrapped up droppings in a plastic bag and decided I should go around the garden to pick up whatever trash had blown in. There wasn't much. So I looked in the car for trash, and found a receipt for a bucket of chicken from KFC Port Dickson, which I added to the bag of trash before I chucked it into the bin.

There's lots more to be done, but doing chores around the house all by myself gets tiresome after a while and I end up watching TV instead. Doing chores is not tiresome, but being alone while doing them is.