My five-year-old has just informed me about his love for cupcakes, despite the fact that “cupcakes ah also fahts, daddy.”

Heh, I’d forgotten that. I’ma get ‘im with that one later…

Father-in-law, Poppy, is a smallish, wiry, thin, deceptively strong old man, but he occasionally requires a bit more muscle when working any number of his odd jobs, and he invites me along. Cash in my hand is a sweet incentive, the work isn’t meant to kill me, and he’s damn easy to be around.

So we built a fence. A big one.

Fairly-newly-richened whitetrash lady likes to scream at her kids and husband and hire out Poppy for any old chore around their rather stately joint. The money’s good and he puts up with it, but she has absolutely zero right to have such a well-adjusted and pleasant 14-year old daughter. I figured, or at least had hoped, that she was hanging around me and Poppy because of her raging hormones and my irresistible sexitudiness, but it turns out that she genuinely and sincerely possesses a strong work-ethic and nothing but the purest of intentions for wanting to subject herself to such adverse conditions (both the hotter-n-fuck weather and my sweatystinkynastysexy self).

So we hammered and sawed and I dug somewhere between 23 and eleventy brazillian holes a half meter deep and put really fucking heavy posts and really fucking heavy bags of concrete in them.

It was good, but hard, but good.

Somewhere along in there, my wedding ring disappeared. To keep it from getting all scratched up, I’d tied it to the string around my neck using my bestest Boy Scout knot, yet forgot not only that I’m a complete dipnuggeted tardigan, but that I got thrown out of the Scouts before I got that fucking badge. A brief moment of carelessness and stupidity, for which I am known for many, basically wrecked me.

I had help in my search for it, I had a basic idea of where it might have been, but it wasn’t getting found. I traced and re-re-re-traced all my steps, as did my help, and we found not a clue. We knocked off early as I was apparently so perilously close to breaking down that Poppy didn’t trust me to carry the 40-kilo posts without repeatedly banging one against my head.

I wasn’t having fun. Wife wasn’t having fun either, and we were both quite down. It wasn’t the money, it wasn’t the hassle, it was just that thing that you couldn’t hope to explain to any dude who’s never been happily married.

The next day, we rented a metal detector, I figured out how to use it, and I spent two solid hours going over every spot I could think of, including checking each two-foot concrete posthole. I don’t know what I would’ve done had the sensor sounded above one of the now-filled-in holes, but I had a hammer, a chisel, a song, and I wasn’t to be stopped.

My heart leapt when I actually found a ring instead of a bottlecap or a used prophylactic (high iron content in his diet?) but I just as quickly threw it into the next time zone when I found it to be a crappy old “mood ring” from some crappy vending machine.

I was still not having fun. Neither was wife. Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but we were both left thinking, “But this shit just doesn’t happen to us! It just doesn’t.” We made some wishes and went to bed. Wife held her finger up, I blew the eyelash off of it, and she reminded me that you can’t chase down wishes, you have to just let them come to you. That night, we dreamt of losing things like mythical animals bound for The Ark (anybody ever heard of a “tanto?”) and about clues to finding our Heart’s Desire left in broken Spanish (I told her it meant “Green Estuary” though it could’ve just as easily been “Burnt Cookie Dough.”).

I worked my ass off the next day, with what appeared to be a firm resolve to a “job well done,” but instead what was in fact a need to get finished and get out of there. The work wasn’t near as exhausting as walking around with constant radar on, finely tuned and highly sensitive, and I was growing sick of the futility of it all.

We finished the fence and hung the wrought-iron gate, and the assemblage went into the house to sort out the cash and such. I stayed behind to take one last walk, casting cursory looks to my left and right and occasionally down, but certainly not seeing anything for I was not really looking. For some inexplicable reason, I thought that it was somehow going to reveal itself to me.

My walk finished, there was no more fence to traverse. I was done.

I walked to the front of the driveway, pulled the dropbars up, and proudly swung the wide gates inward. I was enjoying a comfortable sense of accomplishment while staring at the gate when I simply had to turn my head and look down. Though I don’t know why, I stared directly into a spot that I would never have seen from any other angle and had previously been searched thoroughly.

And there it was.

There in a crack in the concrete, an inch and a half wide, four inches deep, and about nine inches long, sat my ring. The light that did hit it wasn’t significant enough to make it glint or shine and I had to stare for a few seconds before I could even make out it was there. I had no right looking in that exact spot with such intensity, though even if I had I wouldn’t have picked anything up with my previous radar’s strength.

I lost it two days previous, spent a combined 10 man-hours searching for it over a 500 square meter area, and within 10 minutes of finishing up the job, had found it in a place so obscure and simple it boggles.

I don’t know why I found it, but I’m not asking too many questions.

It’s back and I’m whole again.

We, Wife and I that is, are talking about… you know. Stuff.

We’d talked about it previously, but never with such definitiveness, and now we’ve got some plans about said Stuff for sometime in the not-too-distant future.

But that means that we’ve got to quit smoking.

Which I’ve never done.

Which sucks mightily.

I had decided Tequila is the solution, but that’s a hard one to argue to the boychild who is coercing me into yet another viewing of “A Bug’s Life” and the girlchild sprawled across my lap, so “Kirk’s Pasito*” it is.

I’ve seen that it’s National De-lurking Something, and though my first urge is to call all of you out, I realized that this would be a mistake.

Not that I don’t care if “Shawna” in Shitpoke, Iowa reads this worthless shit.

I do. She’s terribly sweet, that Shawna, and probably would send me nekkid pichers iffin’ I asked. Awesome, but what the fuck IS with Iowa anyway?

No, it’s just that I’ve relearned how to be a complete freak about my stats, and have been checking them lately.

I know who you are.

I thought I’d take this moment to delurkifierize myself, to a certain extent, and come out of the I-check-stats-so-obsessively-I-notice-any-anomaly closet.

So, to whomever you are out there, Smooches.

Smooches to Cork, Ireland. There’s only one of you, I’m pretty sure, and you don’t come by very often, but you do come by. Lovely to see you here and hope that you don’t have a flaming case of crotchrot from the experience.

Smooches to Cape Something, South Africa. There’s only one of you too, as far as I can tell, but you come back with about the same frequency as our Mick friend above, and I wish you the same good fortune concerning lack of problems in your crotchenities.

Full on Tongue to Argentina, I remember who you are as I’ve dropped by your blog too, but refresh my memory and consider yourself added to the Fungus Free Nether Regions Group, or FFNRG (which is remarkably similar to the noise you make when you AREN’T).

Kiss on top of the head to Malaysia, for I’ve seen many of your people around these parts and I’m pretty sure I’d throw my back out trying to reach my lips to anywhere else. I keed, I don’t know anything more about you than where you are and how often you read. And your screen resolution, but I can’t imagine caring less than I do about that (who designs these feckin’ stat programs?).

China, you come and go so often that I can’t keep track if you’re real. Even after throwing out the referring pages that have to do with “dog piss sewing pussy leather peanut monkey fuck” I’m left with hits from China that make me think you might love me more than… um… Monkeys.

New Zealand, I don’t really think that you’re the windowlicking cousin of my new home country like the rest of them. There’s one or two of you, but I notice coz I care, and not because we Montanans share a ton of the same sheep jokes.

Big Smooches to mah Aussies, and a heapin’ Thanks for Immigration telling me that I’m all legal ‘n shit. I can do it all but vote in my new home, and who wants any part of that nonsense anyway? I did that kind of shit back in the States and look what happened.

Anyhoo, Adelaide, I think I know who you are, as I do Canberra, but Melbourne and Sydney have too many for me to sort. Hey Dinky-Marzy-baby, not sure if you want link action or not and I forget which city you’re in, but I see you comin’ by. Smooches sweets.

Oh, and Phillipines, you have your fair share of funkyassmonkeynut searches, but I think there might be some real folks there that find me slightly more interesting than that chick in the tub. Ha, I almost got that out without giggling. Fuck.

Canuckleheads, there’s a fuckload of you. Smooches to all of you, except for the Surly One, who gets a size-11 steel cap inna arse. I see you, and I’m pretty sure that none of you are my old hockey coach. Just in case you are though, “Hey Holzer, Eat a Bowl of Fuck. Love, Your Goalie.”

I didn’t necessarily mean to do this by country, but big smooches to all ‘Mercan friends. I see you in your respective states, checking in here regardless of whether or not I’ve updated. Some of you waste at least a few seconds almost every freakin’ day, and I can’t quite figure out why you don’t sign up for Notify, or Dland’s buddy-thingy or something, but hey, it’s your obsessio… I mean, deal.

So, I don’t ask you to de-lurk, just hold still while I poke some fun at you.

I love you all.

Not really, but MOST of you, and that’s lots, so there.