Don't Fixate -- Fix!

Our little granddaughters love the Monkey Bar set that we added to their playground, which is hidden behind a stand of trees in our back yard. In short order we discovered that our dog, Artax, also loved it. The ten foot diameter encircles a heavy layer of mulch, which we produced by gathering lots of dry limbs, twigs and leaves and putting them through our chipper. Then came the shoveling and spreading.

But enough about our aches, pains and bruises. Back to Artax.

Once their mother pried their twenty tiny fingers from the red and blue geodesic dome to take them home, Annabella and Evelyn had unknowingly surrendered their newly mulched area to our dog -- who decided it was the perfect pooping place. Which we didn't discover until a week later. More shoveling to do.

Then we asked the ever empowering question -- How can we fix this?

I said, "We need to put a fence around the Monkey Bar Set to keep the dog out, but let the girls in."

So Frank did the measuring, drove to Home Depot, bought enough chicken wire to surround the mulched area (the heavy duty stuff, so as not to insult Artax), loaded it into the truck, unloaded it at home, trimmed it, wove it through some trees to make it less offensive visually, used tent stakes to affix it to the ground, put a hook in a tree trunk at a height easily accesible to the girls, then tried it out and yes, it is easily openable by little hands but not by paws. We stood back and admired our job.

We're a great team. I usually come up with a good idea, then Frank does all the work.

He's very handy, and also has a wonderful way with words. To describe our relationship, Frank often says that I'm the kite and he's the string. Without me he'd just lie around on the ground, and without him I'd just disappear into space.

The moral of the story though is this: When confronted with a problem, don't fixate on it... fix it. A solution will come to you once you get past your initial reaction.

In this case ours was: "Well, crap!"