How I spent my Saturday.

You guys remember hearing about all the weeds in the back yard. I've talked about pulling them for ages, but the weekends were ether rainy (our multi-year drought is apparently over), or sunny, with other much more fun things planned. Lets say I was easily distracted, knowing what was ahead of me.

Well, I finally bit the bullet, and went out there with a mission. First, here are some "before" shots, to give you a little perspective. Here's an old one, from when we had snow back on Easter.



See. Moderately weedy, with a few brush piles from prunin' the stuff up on the steps. Well...



Lets just say, I let things go a bit. What, I'm a busy guy!



And the side of the yard, where I tried to put in a weed barrier and a paving stone patio last year.



Worked like a charm, eh? I tell ya, this shit just materialized. One day they're little things, and yer tellin' yourself that you'll get to it next weekend. Then you walk out there and it's the friggin' Amazon jungle.

You know... Back yard; out of sight, out of mind. Hell the cats live back there, and I usually don't go out there much. They have a door set up in a window sill that they use to come and go at will, so I don't have to keep getting up to let them out and in again, over and over. But when the cats started comin' in with burrs in their hair, and rubbing up against my leg while I sat here at this machine, I knew I had to do somethin'. It rained like crazy Friday, so I knew that most of the little critters would be easy to pull. Once I did that, the rest would be just a process of chopping and trimming the grass.

Well, I spent about 8 hours out there in the muggy heat, swillin' iced green tea or water like a fish, and resting now and then when I started feeling like I was having a heart attack. Now I know why folks back in the day fought so hard to keep all that "free" labour. Sit on a porch in the shade and sip a Mint Julep while 30 or 40 slaves did all the sweating... Not that I'm advocating it! Hard work builds character, or so they say.



This looks like I've got grass growin' out of my ass, but it's just fallin' off the chopper in the back swing. Note the growing pile of debris. I think I strained my right bicep swingin' this thing, but I just kept it up and the pain went away.

The cats hung around and helped me, in their own little way.



This is "W". He lives in the yard in my bush. Well, it made sense at the time.



This is Tiger, checkin' out my dirty wet gloves. Likes the smell of sweaty leather, but who doesn't? They love it when big bro comes out back and hangs with them, but they split as soon as the gas trimmer came out from the garage.

About midday, I had a freaky thing happen with my right hand. Must have been dehydrated, and using muscles that hadn't had a work out like this in a good while. I was pulling weeds and found that my thumb and index finger were being drawn into my palm, the muscles spasming, and I couldn't extend them easily. I sat down and drank some iced green tea...



and took a hammer as a weight and used it to work out the muscles, raising it and lowering it in my hand as I kept my forearm still against my leg. It worked, and I went back to chopping and puling. No problems after that. That's my favorite mug. I got it at Wet "n Wild, back in the late '80s. I used to get a season pass back then and go there every week to swim for a few hours at a time. I'll post about that some time. It was a lot of fun, and an eye opening time.

Slowly I made progress, and finally, by about 6:30, I began to see "the light at the end of the tunnel". About 8 exhausting hours after it all began...



The place was looking a lot more like it's supposed to.



Note the brush pile. After trying to bag a lot of this stuff at first, and finding that my heavy duty bags were crap, easily ripping, and my trash can was crap, with the handle breaking on me and the wheels coming off, I decided to leave the brush there as a compost pile. I'll put chicken wire around it and set it up for real later. I'm increasingly convinced that there's almost nothing in this country left but cheap flimsy crap from China. What the hell have we done to ourselves?

Once I got it all chopped and pulled down to a reasonable level, I busted out the gas trimmer, which made pretty easy work of the rest. Then it was an hour of raking and finishing touches, and then sweeping and washing off the porch.



Still have a lot to do to fix these paving stones and finish this new patio. I'll have to pull up all the stones and start again. Don't like the way it turned out anyway, but that will be another day.



I wanna tell ya, I was one tired mutha. Dirty and scummy, and covered in burrs. I used a comb to get all the burrs off my arms and legs, and out of my hair. I kicked the wet and dirty shorts in the bin and hit the shower. That hot shower felt almost orgasmic after all this bullshit, and I was thinkin' that I need to set up a hot tub back there one of these days, so I can relax after work and burn all this sort of pain away. I miss the hot tub at the gym I used to work out at a long time ago. I need to start doin' that sort of stuff again so my stamina returns. Who says you have to be old AND feeble?.

Well, that's how I spent my Saturday. Sunday will be comparatively easy; mowing the front yard, planting a few things in the back, and taking the folks and sis out to The Outback for Fathers day dinner. I hope all your weekends were comparatively relaxing, and all you dads out there have a great Fathers day. Cheers.