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