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Freddie has some vacation time he has to use before the end of the first quarter, so last week he asked me to check our passports and make sure they are still valid, since he was thinking about running away to Cancun or similar for the weekend.

Passports are valid, so yay! Let’s go!

As the planning evolved, we found we didn’t really want to go sit on a beach for four days. We live in New Jersey, if we really feel the need to get sand in our collective asscrack, we can mosey down the shore (which is something we don’t do often enough, but whatever). So… where else could we go?

Freddie wanted the trip to be easy and relatively stress-free, so that meant going to a place where English is widely spoken. Which is… anywhere these days, but after some thinking we decided to head to London.

LONDON! Possibly my favorite city on Earth!

Yes, I know there’s a great big world out there and lots of stuff to see and do, but I could be happy travelling to the UK and nowhere else for the rest of my life. Between actual decent beer, the best cheeses in the world, accents, bone-dry humor, and unrepentantly trashy TV, it’s pretty much the place where I belong.

So we’re headed out on Thursday. No computers! No cell phones! We might purchase a guidebook to assist us in getting around but our advance planning via the internet might make that unnecessary. Four days, and the only MUST-DO things on the list are a trip to the Earl of Lonsdale pub in Notting Hill, and a quick train trip to Salisbury and from there, Stonehenge.

Yes, I know, Stonehenge isn’t that big a deal. But it is! Last time we were there, in 2001, Britain was in the midst of a hoof-and-mouth epidemic and Stonehenge was CLOSED. Yes, closed. We got off the train at Salisbury and there was a sign on the platform saying Stonehenge was closed. We asked the dude at the station what our options were and he told us about taking a cab where you could drive past and see it from the road or taking a bus that would swing past there, but one option was crazy-expensive and the other would take a total of 5 hours all told, so we got back on the train and headed to Bath for the day.

So we’re going back. And this time I am determined to get as close to Stonehenge as I can, because it has fascinated me since I was a wee lass.

And of course, there’s the promise of beer. Lots and lots of beer.

Yesterday, we went to the local hardware stores to acquire things with which to build boxes for my garden. What should have been a quick trip to one store (we had a list!) turned into an epic journey that involved a second store, lots of eye-rolling and huffy sighing on my part, some math, and some inspiration. So, instead of four boxes that will fit cutely between the fence posts, we decided to build two boxes that are 6′ x 12′.

The problem stems from the fact that our backyard does not have dirt in it. We’ve got CLAY. Lots and lots of reddish clay and about 43 different kinds of weeds. The Lawn Doctor guy told me that out of the 23 or so varieties of weeds that live in this part of New Jersey, our backyard is home to at least 20 of them.

Thus we need to build raised garden beds, which we will fill with topsoil, compost, and my 72 tomato plants. The ‘throw it in the ground and see what happens’ approach we took last year was fairly successful, so I figured if we add a little planning and a smidgen of science to the garden this year, we’ll be able to do even more. We shall see.

Annnnnnnyway, we acquired our materials and built the boxes with only a little bit of cursing and no lost limbs. I’m considering the project a success for that reason alone! The only major work left to get Garden 2009 off the ground (or… on it, I guess) is to hack up the remaining sod from the area where the beds will be. Then we’ll get some topsoil delivered, dump it in, and put the seeds and seedlings in. The hacking, though, must come first and aaaaaaaaaagh.

Hard work, this hacking is. I use my garden hoe, since that seems to be the most effective method, but man oh man is it slow. Freddie used the spade which was way faster! He and Jillian were out there this morning hacking away when I got home from Mama Escape Time. We are 75% of the way there - with any luck, this week will see the end of the hacking and we can get topsoil in by the weekend and then IT IS ONNNNNNNNNNN.

I can’t wait to see what kind of resistance Mother Nature puts up this year.

It’s nearly spring, and that means that there is local asparagus in the store! It looked so lovely yesterday that I bought some and cooked it up for dinner.

I always forget why I should be hesitant to do that.

In the interests of environmentalism, I like to use the yellow-mellow policy regarding the bathroom. On a normal day, this is just fine and does not affect us adversely at all.

The day after asparagus, however, is a different story altogether. There are people who do not have that particular genetic sequence that allows them to smell asparagus pee, and I envy those people more than they will ever know.