"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Monday, March 29
One Day In The Life
Busy, busy weekend, much of it spent in the role of chaffeur, carting kids around from place to place. Haircut, museum school, toy store, tool store, tennis practice. Spent an hour's worth of free time in Border's looking at books I didn't want to buy (they didn't have the ones I do want).
My "spare time" I spent writing the first third of a new story, which must be finished Wednesday (!!!) if I want to beat the submission deadline; reading John Dunning's new Cliff Janeway novel, The Bookman's Promise; and rocking the baby to sleep, changing diapers, etc.
But mostly I worked in the yard.
I hate yard work. Hate it with a passion. In my youth I was charged with mowing, edging, raking leaves in the fall, all the usual lawn care tasks, and I hated every minute of it. I suppose it wouldn't have been so bad except that our yard seemed like it was 40 acres, with 200 trees. You haven't lived until you've rammed your mower into a hidden root with such force that the handle gives you a quick spleenectomy.
Our front flower bed doesn't have a border to separate it from the yard, so over the past year it's slowly been overrun by grass. So I decided to turn the plot into a little gated community for my shrubs, with a brick wall to keep out the undesirables. So I bought a stack of 20-pound "castle wall" landscaping bricks. Their rough, unfinished appearance is pleasantly rustic, and I'm sure the skin they brutally ripped from my hands will only add to the effect. Fortunately I chose the red bricks instead of sandstone or terra cotta, so the bloodstains won't be visible.
My motto is, "No job is done until it's overdone!" so I spent a lot of time digging, prepping the foundation, leveling the lower tier, etc. It didn't help that I got interrupted every 5 minutes or so for some piddling little chore like "pick up the kids", etc. I felt like Ivan Denisovitch, trying to finish the wall before the guards haul me back to my cell. "The three extra days were for leap years..." Indeed.
Upshot: 90% more effort for 10% more effect. Egad, I'm turning into Martha Stewart! The final result was suitably awesome. Flat as a pancake, full of neatly trimmed bushes with all that filthy, nasty dirt covered by nice, clean mulch. In a single weekend my yard jumped from "redneck loser" to "anal-retentive curve-buster" in the neighborhood rankings.
Hopefully the wall will be high enough to keep out the torch-bearing, pitchfork-wielding crowd shouting "Death to the overachiever!"
