G is for Gardening

If you are reading this with the hope that you will get some terrific gardening tips, you've come to the wrong place, because I hate, hate, HAAAAAATE gardening.

I hate having dirt on my hands. I hate pulling weeds. I hate touching plants when they have little hairs that grow on their stems or any other part of them, and I hate it even more if they have thorns. I hate the crawly things in gardens, whether they are crawling on their bellies or crawling with their feet. I hate getting sweaty and filthy. I hate when flying insects zoom by my head and I have to do a manic dance to make sure it's not caught in my hair.

I. Hate. It. All.

Guess what I had to do yesterday? Garden.

We've been out of town, staying socially distant by staying at the lake house (the view is good, even if we can't go anywhere; in fact, I saw a bald eagle fly by the kitchen window this afternoon). I went home earlier this week to take care of some technical stuff with my work iPad, and the first thing I noticed when I pulled up was how messy the yard was. Onion grass and chick weed were popped up all over the place, and the bushes on either side of the front door were out of control with new growth, as was the holly bush that I REALLY dislike and have tried (unsuccessfully) to kill.

This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but I have never mowed a lawn before. I don't know how to start the mower. I don't WANT to know how to start the mower. I never plan on NEEDING to start the mower, because I will burn the lawn down before I will mow it. Okay, not really, but I would surely pay someone to cut it before I would EVER do it myself.

My answer was to use the weed eater. Ours is a power one (if it were gas powered, it would go in the lawn mower category of me not using it). The cord has to be threaded through the mail slot on our front door to get power, as there is no electrical outlet on the front of our house (it's over 80 years old, so we forgive it for that ), but once that was done, I swung it like a scythe across the yard and took down the weeds. I also whacked the ground with it quite a few times, making some pretty fair divots, and you can conclude correctly that I don't play golf any more than I mow lawns. 

I got out the hand clippers, and the holly bush and I took turns attacking each other. I bled, it didn't, so I think we know who won. I trimmed the overgrown bushes down into respectable, rounded shapes (think sisters, not twins). I even cut down an old bush that was 3/4 dead, and if survives my pruning, great, and if it doesn't, oh, well, and it was at that point that something ran out of the flower bed and up onto the tire of our SUV that was parked nearby. 

It was a horribly hideous spider. Not a wolf spider, but something fleshy colored and huge and FAST. It sat on the tire, mocking me, and as I got brave enough to take a picture of it (zoom was my friend), I marveled that it was so creepy that I couldn't even tell which end was the head and which was the hiney, and at that moment, it TOOK OFF and ran towards me. 

Gardening. Done. Forever.

Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!

Meh. Not bad.