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.
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