Adventures In Yard Care (Part II)

This morning began much like Saturday did. I awoke at around 6:30 to go let the dogs out. In their less-than-subtle way, they were letting me know they wanted to go out. While they don't overtly try to wake us, they adopt some passive-aggressive behaviors to get us to wake up and let them out. They sigh loudly. They pace. They will move to another spot of the room and flop heavily on the carpet as if they collapsed there from exhaustion. They lick. The Staffordshire terrier flaps her ears loudly. All of these “subtle” behaviors would wake up a coma victim.

Anyway, I arose and went downstairs to let them out into the back yard. I made me some coffee. I fired up the laptop. I sat in a torpor, drinking coffee and dinking around with the laptop. In actuality, though it is hard for me to get up in the morning and I don't really consider myself to be a morning person, once I am up I enjoy the peace and solitude of being up early in the morning. I can enjoy a precious hour or perhaps two of reading or surfing the Internet or watching TV.

But solitude, like anything rare and fragile, does not last long. Soon the household was awake and it was time to begin the day. Like yesterday, I decided to get outside and do some yard work. Specifically, I decided to continue my efforts to tidy up the front flower beds. Originally, I was going to pull up all the Japanese ivy that has been running rampant and unabated for the past ten or more years. However, just as I was about to grab my first handful and give a hearty yank, I noticed a large garden spider in the center of her orb web (see actual photo above). I've always been something of an “arachnophile” (if there's such a word). I've always been fascinated by spiders and like to observe them. I don't necessarily want them in my house and and I certainly don't want them on me, but I've adopted a live-and-let-live attitude towards them (and I hope they have the same attitude towards me).

So, I decided to leave that particular patch of Japanese ivy alone and to turn my attentions to other areas. There are two boxwood hedge bushes, one on either side of the walkway leading to the front door that did not fare very well during last winter's bitter cold temperatures and several snowstorms. They've looked sickly ever since. And, to be quite honest, I've never cared much for them anyway. So, I got out my trusty branch cutters, hack saw, and hatchet and got to work.

The conditions today were almost identical to yesterday's. That is, it was near 100 degrees and 100% humidity. So, while cutting the bushes down to their trunk was easy, removing the trunk took a lot more effort. I dug all around the trunk and the ball of roots immediately beneath the trunk. This was not made easier by the Texas clay in which the boxwoods grew. Digging in Texas “black gumbo” clay is either like digging in concrete if conditions are dry or like digging in modeling clay if conditions are damp. Today, the conditions were damp.

The roots of the boxwood shrubs were well established and it took much flailing with the hatchet and much leveraging with the spade to get the root ball up. By the time I'd gotten the two of them dug up, I was a physical wreck. My clothes were drenched in sweat. My heart was pounding at a rate two or three times normal. My breathing was fast and heavy. My muscles were quivering and twitching with exhaustion. I had to sit on the front step and rehydrate and wait for my bodily statistics to drop out of the red zone and back into the yellow (green was only a remote possibility at that point).

So, needless to say, I was pretty much done at that point. I tried to keep going. I did a little raking up of some of yesterday's trimmings. I got out the garden rake and raked up some of the thatch from the St. Augustine grass. I pulled up some Japanese ivy. But these efforts did not even rise to the level of “half-hearted”. By the time I'd gotten all of the trimmings lugged to the back alley, I was done for the day.

Adventures in Yard Care (Part I)

This morning I awoke at 6:15. I wouldn’t ordinarily wake up at such an unnatural hour, but the dogs woke up and decided it was time to go outside for a potty break. Somehow over the years they’ve been trained to get up at around 6:00 a.m. to go outside. Not sure how that happened. Certainly they didn’t learn such behavior from me.

Anyway, I rolled out of bed and let them do their thing outside while I made me some coffee. I sat in a quiet nook in the house and played on my laptop for awhile until the rest of the house was awake. I made breakfast (eggs, sausage, and rice) and then went outside to get busy with the yardwork. By this time it was 9:00.

Another common theme you’ll notice in these blogs of mine is the fact that I hate yardwork. I’m not one of those people that will let it go until I get nasty letters from the homeowner’s association, but I begrudge every moment I spend outside trying to tame the untamable elements. I’m not an outdoorsy person. I’d much prefer to live in a high-rise penthouse where lawn care consists of watering the potted fichus trees in the entryway. Unfortunately, I was born in the wrong economic bracket and so far have only managed to claw my way to upper middle class. We here in the UMC have houses in the suburbs with the requisite lawns. Most male suburbanites like to get into competitions with their neighbors for the best lawn on the block. I’m not one of those people. I do enough yardwork to get by, but odds of me getting to put the “Lawn of the Month” sign in my yard are pretty slim. In fact, the odds makers are not even making odds that it will happen.

So, the fact that I was outside by 9:00 a.m. and in the process of mowing the lawn was a small personal victory, much like a child who manages to take a few timid bites of broccoli. Now, when I do finally manage to encourage myself to get out and do yardwork, I am no slacker. I don’t do it slapdash or half-heartedly. I put my all into it. Being borderline OCD compels me to do a good job. But it is a hollow victory. I should feel good about it, but I don’t. A child is not proud of himself for eating broccoli, he’s just happy that it’s over.

As if hating to do yardwork was not bad enough, doing yardwork in Texas provides additional punishment in the form of oppressive heat and humidity. And this morning, Texas outdid itself. The temperature quickly climbed into the 90s and, thanks to the rains yesterday, the humidity was near 100%. One can’t work in those conditions for very long without risking dehydrations. I kept myself well hydrated with some iced tea I’d made the night before, but the best one can do when working in near-100 degree weather is to merely postpone the point of heatstroke.

So, I did the normal things (mowed, edged, swept), but then I also got a wild hare and decided to trim up all the bushes in the front yard. They’ve needed it for a few weeks but my hectic work schedule and the intermittent rains have made me postpone it longer than I intended. So I got out my shears and my branch cutters (all manual … nothing electric for me) and began trimming. I trimmed up the crepe myrtles. I shaped the boxwoods (these in particular are a misnomer in my yard in that they are spherically shaped). I trimmed the pomegranate bush (i.e. I tried to make it look more like a tree than a bush).

And then, perhaps crazed by the sun, I decided to go a little bit further. There are some holly bushes in front of the house that have been large, green (and very prickly) rectangular boxes since I moved into the house. Once in awhile I dutifully clip them back into a box shape when they start looking a little shaggy. But today I thought I’d make them look more tree-like and less shrub-like. For me, this was like a neophyte, amateurish attempt at bonsai or topiary. I could have just plunged into the huge holly bushes with my cutters and sheers and started whacking off all of the lower branches. I did that to a degree, but I also was careful about which branches I whacked. I wanted the effect to be a sort of “floating box”. This I accomplished and was rather proud of the final cut (so to speak), even if I do say so myself. I should have done that years ago. It made the front flower bed look MUCH better.

About midway through my first attempt at holly topiary, the dehydration and heatstroke hit me like a hot frying pan. By this time three hours had gone by. Three hours of sweating profusely, exercising vigorously, and taking the full heat of the sun. When I hit this wall and realized that my day of working in the yard was over, I still had about 30 minutes of clean-up to do. I had to bag all of the clippings and drag all of the cut branches around to the back of the house. I did this, but every step became like a miniature Iditarod. By the time I got everything lugged back to the alleyway, I was a spent force.

I took an cold shower, put on some cool, loose clothes, and collapsed in a heap on the couch. Unfortunately, I can’t stay sitting for too long or my muscles start to seize up. The stiffness creeps into my muscles and joints and getting them unfrozen, while only mildly uncomfortable, has the unfortunate side-effect of making me move like an old man of 90. Worse still, a man of 90 who never particularly took care of himself.

So, I think I will be spending the rest of the day not doing much of anything except trying to stay moving so that the machinery doesn’t freeze up.



June 26, 2010
Somewhere in Texas

Friday Thoughts

Today turned out to be surprisingly cool thanks to some unexpected clouds that rolled in. There was a bit of rain that stopped soon enough, but the clouds lingered and helped keep the temperature at around 87, which is a far sight cooler than the 100 degrees everyone was expecting.

This weekend will no doubt be like all of the other weekends in my adult life. I enter the weekend with all sorts of bold plans and schemes, but by Sunday evening I have done none of them and am instead sitting there in a daze wondering where the weekend went to. I expect this weekend will be no different, though I have an ambitious plan to tidy up the front flower bed.

You may not think that the phrase “tidy up the flower bed” sounds particularly ambitious or bold, but in my case it is. For one thing, I hate doing yard work. I am an indoors person. Secondly, over the years the front flower bed has become less of a flower bed and more of a “whatever will grow” bed. That is not as bad as it sounds. You no doubt have visions of a xeriscaped lawn that inspires letters from the homeowner’s association.

No, my flower bed is nothing like that. It has become more of a shrubbery bed and is crowded with holly, boxwood, crepe myrtle, Japanese ivy, and monkey grass. The monkey grass I particularly loathe because it is just plain unsightly. But I save my most visceral hatred for the Japanese ivy. This stuff should be banned. It is advertised as a ground cover, but it would be more accurately marketed as blight upon the land. It is a creeping vine that will soon cover everything in its path. It threads its way through anything with an opening. It creates an impenetrable mass of vines and roots that cannot be dug up with any ordinary implement. It takes heavy equipment and napalm. I don’t have either. And, unless you get rid of every last molecule of the blasted vine, it will sprout anew and pick up where it left off as if nothing had happened.

At any rate, I plan to try and tame it this weekend. If you never hear from me again, you’ll know what happened.





June 25, 2010
Somewhere in Texas

A Blog is Borne

Hello Everyone!

This is not my first attempt at blogging. I had a rather lengthy and long-running blog on Yahoo Y!360 that was very popular among the tens, or perhaps dozens of readers that I had. Yahoo eventually decided to pull the plug on Y!360 (doing a complete 180 on their promises to keep it going) and so all of my precious blogs were cast into the ether, never to be seen again. In retrospect, that may be a good thing.

After that, I had another blog here on Blogspot and I enjoyed writing it and it again enjoyed the traffic of perhaps tens of readers. However, I found I just couldn’t seem to get the creative juices flowing. After much contemplation I finally reached the conclusion that the reason my muse had abandoned me was that I had linked my blog to my Facebook page and so my blog was being read by people that I actually know. This had a stultifying effect on my writing.

So, I decided to start another blog, but this time anonymously. That way I will not be inhibited by knowing it is being read by people I know. The downside to this plan, however, is that my readership will drop from tens down into perhaps single digits. Or less.

So, I will have to get out and drum up readers somehow. Not having the personality of a salesman, this will be a challenge. However, I think I can pull it off by popping onto other peoples’ blogs and leaving random comments and pretending that I know them somehow. In this way, people will begin to trickle into my blog and may even read a thing or two. Or they may just browse without buying anything and leave to go to the blog down the street which has more interesting fare (at least, according to that blog’s owner).

So, you may be curious to know who I am. I doubt that sincerely, but I’ll try to tell you as much as I can without actually revealing who I am. Otherwise my muse will abandon me again and, the economy being what it is, I can’t afford another muse right now.

I’m a man firmly ensconced in middle age. I am neither young nor old, falling into that ethereal place that men find themselves in between the ages of about 42 and 54 wherein they become invisible. This comes in handy for listening in on peoples’ conversations, but it is also useless in that we are at that age where we can’t seem to remember things we hear for more than about five minutes. We’re too young for senior discounts, but too old to be able to use our charms to finagle (or finesse) discounts on our own. Women have stopped noticing us. Other men have stopped being threatened by us. Youth don’t seem to even see us.

So, it is a “best of times, worst of times” situation. We simply exist. We observe, but we don’t comment, because who cares what a middle-aged man has to say? Just at the point in our lives when we are the most opinionated, everyone simultaneously stops wanting to hear our opinions. So we just keep it inside. It’s easier that way.

Well, you may not care what I have to say, but I’m going to say it anyway. I won’t be commenting on politics or philosophy, but I will be spouting off on lawn care and traffic and anything else that catches my attention on any given day. I’m too young to be a curmudgeon, but I’m wearing the paper trainee hat as a curmudgeon-in-training.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my blogs. Comments are always welcome!


June 23, 2010
Somewhere in the Suburbs of Texas