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May 25, 2006
Another Blazing Saddles allusion
I'm tired, right down to the bone. For the past month, I've been spending every available minute in the garden, getting those perennial beds in. (Yes, bedS. Six of them. But each one is small, I swear.) Big mistake: two days ago I lanced a boil that's been festering for some time: I got out the pruning clippers, saw, and mattock and attacked an enormous forsythia that had been encroaching for some years on the pathetic and peculiar excuse for a patio that sits between the compost pile, collapsing barn, parking area, and perennial beds. I worked for three-four hours on that forsythia, swinging the mattock to dig up stumps; cutting back branches that had gone berserk; and sawing the ones that were too big for pruning clippers. At one point the forsythia fought back, whacking me in the back of the head hard enough that today it's bruised and sore. (It's in one of the spots where I took one of the blows to the head in the car wreck last year, which kind of has me freaked out and bummed.) The forsythia still isn't done; I got enough of it out that I felt victorious and could leave the rest till later.
But that delayed work on the perennial garden by a day, and it also wore me out so that I wasn't good for much yesterday and today.
And when I say I'm spending "available" time on the garden, that means I'm also working like crazy on the handbook and trying to get caught up on several other projects.
I only have 6 square feet left to plant, but it's a beastly 6 square feet, full of rocks and weeds. It's been rototilled, but the rocks and weeds have to be picked out before plants go in. So it's slow.
Once this job is done, I'm going to spend all my time out there at my table, on my "patio," with my 4-bar wireless internet connection, w-r-i-t-i-n-g. But will this job EVER be done? It feels as if the answer is "no." I am tired, bone tired. I'm working against the calendar: each day the temperature rises, and the plants have to get it while it's still cool and damp enough for them to take root and survive. But the writing has to get done, too, so each morning I get up and put in several hours on that.
Right now, I wouldn't mind being 30 years younger. With a hired lawn service.
You gotta hear Madeline Kahn singing it: "Let's face it, I'm pooped."
Posted by senioritis at May 25, 2006 10:12 PM