Is It Time Yet?

It is the first week of April and that means two things: yard clean up and prom shopping. The first, yard clean up, is a necessary chore.  It has been a long, cold and windy winter. Since my house is on a corner lot, and only a block from a multitude of stores and gas stations, there seems to be a lot to clean up. 

I didn’t keep an accurate tally, but I picked up a multitude of old soda pop bottles, a few beer cans, a host of cigarette packs and an assortment of lottery tickets.  Needless to say, the bottles and cans were empty, as were the cigarette packs. And if there was a doubt, every single one of the lottery tickets was a loser. Every. Single. One.

I found this to be rude. If you are going to deposit your personal property on my personal property at least make it personally profitable for me to put your stuff where it belongs.

This complete disregard for my labor in keeping my yard clean left me in a funk. To alleviate that funk, I decided to do some therapeutic shoe shopping. Note, the shopping wasn’t for shoes that are therapeutic, it was the shopping that was meant to be therapeutic.

For my long time friends and readers, you know that I find nothing therapeutic about shopping. I do, however, find spending time with my family therapeutic. Beloved, Middlest, Littlest, and I went to the mall. The young ladies went shopping for shoes for their respective proms.

While they were looking for new soles, I took my watch to a jeweler for a quick fix. After I handed my timepiece to the kind gentleman behind the counter, he said the repair would be done in about 15 minutes. I, out of the force of habit, looked at my wrist to see what time it was, so I would know when to pick the watch up. Then I looked at the kind gentleman behind the counter, and we both laughed at my epic fail.

While I waited for the womenfolk to pick out the right shoes and my watch to be repaired, I sat out on a bench in the mall. I was facing one of the kiosks that sells mediocre jewelry at bargain basement prices. There was a young couple shopping for some bling. The male part of the couple sat on a bench near me, while the female looked over all the shiny stuff.

After a few moments, the female came around from the far side of the kiosk and yelled in the most romantic way possible while shopping at a mall and looking at mediocre jewelry, “Hey, what you last name be again?”

Upon hearing that crime committed against grammar and the English language, I looked at my wrist to see if it was time to pick up my watch yet. The watch was still at the jewelers and had not magically reappeared on my wrist.

My family, however, did magically reappear and declared that despite the enormous square footage of the shoe store, there were simply no prom shoes to be had and so, we continued to shop. And shop. While I repeatedly checked my wrist to see if it was time to leave yet.

Winter is Gone; Spring has Sprung; Click up Your Heals and Groan?

It is finally spring time here in the North East. If my life were a made-for-TV movie, it would fade to lovely outdoor scenes with crocuses (or is that crocii?) pushing through rich dark soil, and bursting forth in bright, glorious yellow blooms. The scene would pan upwards to small green buds as they escape from the dark bony limbs of a maple tree.

The scene would then sweep out across the well-kept, newly greening lawn, to view my young children playing in the springtime sun. They would be dressed, smartly, all in white, and despite their springtime shenanigans on the tender grass and the damp earth, their outfits would remain spotless.

Neither my yard, nor my life, is a made-for-TV movie.

My yard, in the springtime, could better be described as a bog; so wet, that it almost borders on being on a small lake. I live on a corner lot, bounded along one edge by a thick row of hedges. My house is downwind from a grocery store, two department stores, a chain pharmacy, and a combination gas station-convenience store-donut shop. There are innumerable scraps of stuff that make their way from these commercial enterprises and end up in my yard; add to that all of the garbage that people toss from their cars as they drive by. I have picked up hundreds of lottery tickets, all of them losers. I am waiting for the day when someone accidentally tosses out the winning ticket onto my lawn. I will probably be kind enough to return it, but they are going to pay a hefty fine for littering in my yard.

In the middle of the yard stands an old apple tree. I know it is old because the trunk is well over two feet in diameter. This winter has been particularly rough on that ol' tree. Early in the season, a heavy wet snowfall brought down a very large branch, and now, in early spring, almost 6 months later, I still need to saw it into smaller pieces and have it removed.

With all of this work needing to be done in my yard, so my teenage children can go out in their white formal attire and frolic, I watched the weather forecast closely. I needed a few days of warmth, sun, and a light breeze, to dry the bog, so I could reclaim it as a yard.

And the weather co-operated. For two days in a row, we had warm sun and gentle breezes. The second day promised to be warmer than 80 degrees. I made mental plans to get outside and start the reclamation process.

Then I saw the forecast for the third day, the day after it was to be above 80. It called for rain, turning to snow, with temperatures falling into the mid 20‘s.

I think I will start a peat moss factory.

It is a Lovely Day for Yard Work...or is it?

The winter has been a mild one here in western New York. All the snow is gone and the temperatures have been more like mid-May rather than mid-March the past few days. This means that soon I will have to start cleaning up winter’s debris from the yard, a job I do not particularly relish.

I decided this past week to do some research on ways to take the drudgery out of doing yard work. Using Google, the third item that popped up on the list was a link to an article about a Utah man who was shot by a neighbor while doing yard work. http://www.ksl.com/?nid=960&sid=17887860 I immediately searched for good places to buy bulletproof vests. Now I just have to convince Beloved that $400 is not too much money to keep me safe while out in the yard.

Although this winter has been light on snow, it has been filled with wind, and this has helped to heap a multitude of debris in the yard. Across the street, condominiums have been being built all winter. Even on those few days of bitter cold, I have seen cold craftsman out on scaffolding putting up siding. At the end of one gusty day, as they were disposing of their refuse in a large dumpster, the wind conspired to make that endeavor difficult. One poor gentleman chased loose sheets of plastic as they blew across the road. He did not get them all and I have a few to pick out of the yard. I do not mind picking up the debris from across the street. I am actually quite thankful that I did not wake up to a new condo that had blown across the street and come to rest in my yard. That would be troublesome.

A couple of years ago I found the remains of a small, I presume extinct, animal in the back yard. My three daughters and I examined the bones carefully, like paleontologists unearthing a new species. Some thought it was a squirrel, others a chipmunk. I believe it was something much more exotic, and as soon as I find out the Latin translation for “Wee little animal with long tail.” I am going to have my own species of dinosaur.

One of the most exciting parts of spring yard clean up is the traditional uncovering of the strawberries. Littlest and I usually undertake that task together. While we do we always chatter about the wonderful things we could make with strawberries, if we ever harvest enough.  The strawberry bed is young, so we have yet to harvest more than five strawberries any season.

There is a tremendous amount of worry that goes into removing the straw and that worry stems from a subset of Murphy’s law. The same section that states, “As soon as you wash your car, it will rain.” The Strawberry Murphy’s law states, “As soon as you uncover your strawberries, it will snow…bad.” So if you see any snow in the next few days, you can be assured that I uncovered the berries.

I have wasted just about as much time as I can writing this. Now I really need to get out in the yard and work. I don’t think Beloved will let me wait until a bulletproof vest gets delivered, so before I go out, let me make sure none of the neighbors are outside carrying firearms.