it is a blah, blah, yucky, rainy day. 
supposed to rain for the rest of the week, at least. joy. the kids will be driving me nuts because they’ll want to go out and play but it’ll be too muddy. not that they will care about that. i’m sure they’d love to play in the mud. um, no. not gonna happen.
i used to play in the mud when i was a kid, but i seemed to know not to get too dirty. let’s take a trip back in time to the mid 70’s shall we? come on, it won’t kill you. i know, i know, i’m sounding like my dad. i don’t care at the moment, ok? hey, nobody’s forcing you to read this!
it was the mid 70’s. we’d been living in that house for a couple of years anyway. it was a new development and we had moved into the first house built. i think, at the time of this story, most of the houses on my block were not only built, but occupied. however there was still a lot of construction going on, big trucks driving by carrying mounds of dirt away to who knows where.
so anyway, i was fairly young, maybe 4 or 5, i’m not really sure. our neighbors to our left, if you are looking out at the street from our house, had 4 boys. the second youngest was a couple of years older than me. since there weren’t many kids in the neighborhood yet, and most of them that were there were even younger than us (if they were even born yet), he and i became friends and played together. he’d come over with a bucket of water and we’d sit in front of my house and make mud out of the dirt that would collect on the street from all the trucks carrying said dirt from the building sites. we used to make little mud houses inhabited by little pebble people. it was great fun. when i think back on it, i can’t believe my parents let me sit on the edge of the road with a 6 year old as my only supervision. times were different then, and perhaps i was being watched without my knowing it. i don’t know.
i look back on those days with fondness. i miss playing in the mud. but now i’m old and practical and jaded. all i can think about is the mess that will be made that i will have to clean up and i don’t want to deal with that. plus i know that at some point, the fun will have to come to an end and it will have to end sooner than my boys will want it to and there will be tantrums. that’s always a sure way to end a warm, fuzzy moment.
it’s a blah, blah, yucky, rainy day.
here's my gripe... 