Tin roof blues

Hi Dave,

It's me, seaweed-harvester ( & temporarily-retired attorney), Bob, of Puget Sound.

I have a domestic problem I thought you might help me with. It concerns my smelly-cheese disdaining wife. I have a condition, Dave, that causes me to buy every available lawn trinket I can lay my hands on. I say "condition" because that's just what my wife calls it. To me, I am normal. I finally bought a tin-roofed shed in the Olympic forest near the Dungeness River off River Road at Sequim. [Snapshot enclosed.]It's not far from what my wife calls our "regular" home.

I stay at the shed whenever I get to missing my figurines, plaster gnomes, flamingoes, and the rest of my beloved motionless friends. Our lawn at home is so pristine - void of anything but the usual trees and shrubbery - that I get attacks of virtual amnesia whenever I mow the pathless, untruly addorned lawn. I'll go out with the mower and quickly forget where I am. There are no reference points. My shed lawn is sparsely mowable with scissors.

This is a much smaller place than the regular home. As soon as I bought it, my wife quickly moved all my friends here. I can still come home, but except for her I am directionless with nothing to bounce off. As a gnome man, according to my reading in the raccoon news, you're one guy who would understand.

In effigy,

Puget Bob

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PB: Know where you're comin' from, know where you're comin' from! I have had to keep my gnome and trinket purchases to a severe minimum, (many of them inside) and even so, my door-to-door educational book-selling son in college has bluntly informed me that he would never stop at our door. "Too many trinkets!" he dismisses, as just a fact of marketing life.

As to your lawn-mowing problem, I do get to keep enough of my gnomes and statues that lawn-mowing navigation trouble is not a factor. Also, my wife herself is the lawn-mower. I'm thinking I've got it quite made here. I get to have some gnomes, and I get the lawn mowed to boot. Yes, I well know that such good fortune is not etched in stone, or epoxy-resin, or plaster. Nothing lasts forever.

If you ever get out our way, Bob, I'll take you to the Dickeyville (WI) grotto, where I sometimes go when my lawn ornament lust builds up. I manage to accept my comparatively untrinketed life with occasional trips there, where I can worship the gnome-age and the billions and billions of intricately-fitted structures made of broken crockery, colored stones, and sea shells. See: http://www.wurlington-bros.com/Museum/Grotto/Dickeyville1.html

Visiting Dickeyville is kind of like visiting a porn website, but the theme there is religious and patriotic. Meanwhile, I'll think of you, Bob, at your luxurious, circumbscribed, trimmed-just-right for-me get-away.

SRN ed.

ps: I love tin roofs when it rains, don't you?