Muscles, Yard Work, and Honey-Do’s

We are a couple weeks into the new year and things are really shaping up. The trees are budding out; grass is beginning to grow, and my bride is itching for me to do massive amounts of yard work on our half acre of heavily landscaped homestead. Never mind that she’s a certified Texas Master Gardener – this is man’s work honey!

I used to go out and do yard work for six straight hours and it was just sweat, not aches and pains. Now I sweat at the gym for hours each day and it appears my muscles are only good for the gym! Yard work is hard I tell you! Heckfire, I can hardly open the plastic bag inside a box of Wheaties… I mean Cheerios. We all know what will happen to you if you eat Wheaties every day.

Try opening the lid on a Power-Ade or Gator-Ade bottle with out a Stillson wrench!  Did I just call a pipe wrench a Stillson wrench? Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe it’s just because I am getting old! My daughter Melody is a hair stylist at the Rat’s Nest and cuts my hair. The other day she cut it and when I got home, the top looked like I had been on an episode of Scare Tactics.  The hair was sticking straight up, so in my elderly wisdom, I trimmed it off in the bathroom sink.

When I leaned forward, I realized why she did it. Now I look like Larry Fine of the Three Stooges!  Whoop whoop whoop!  When did all this hair go bye bye? I don’t know!  I feel like Melvin Roark’s twin brother, but that is not a bad thing, is it? By the way, how does Jim Finley keep his gorgeous youthful looks? I think he’s been nipping at that fountain old Ponce was looking for.

Last year I trimmed on my photinia and ligustrum bushes 3 times and I swear; now it would take a field-grade pogo stick to cut them back. Any day now my bride is going to start pointing this chore out and I am smart enough to just trim them back before she informs me the 10^th time. Now it’s not like I don’t have the yard equipment or anything – or the knowledge on how exactly to go about it, because I have all the bases covered. I just don’t want to do it. I would rather go to the gym and work on my gym muscles so I can appear I am awesome.

That out building I paid to have remodeled sure looks nice. It is just a shame that the doors they made are heavier than the hinges and now I can’t lock the shed. My bride faithfully reminds me of this every three days and after numerous calls to have them promise to fix it.  I am simply going to do it myself… in a few days!

I just took a peek outside. My 25 foot tall “Dwarf” Chinese holly is heavy with red fruit.  In all the years past this meant Spring is here and any second now I expect the tree to be covered with Cedar Waxwing birds on their way south. It is a sight to see and hundreds of them will clean that tree in a day or less. The down side is that I will be cutting my yard for every three days and those danged shrubs will sprout like they are being hand-fed by the Jolly Green Giant!

Don’t get me started on bark much. Okay, thanks a lot just remember that you started it. I cannot haul in enough bags of bark mulch to satisfy my Bride’s desire to cover every square inch of plant beds with 3 inches of mulch. This means at least two dump trucks of mulch will be dumped in my driveway for me to shovel up and wheelbarrow to the back and side yards and my dad-blamed yellow plastic wheelbarrow rusted out over the last 6 months. Of course a man without a usable wheelbarrow is all but useless to most good female overseers, so I’ll have to buy a new one.

I would rather just repair computers in the sterile environment of my man cave, famously known as the Orbiting Command Ship Central or work on my gym muscles, but NOOOO, I have to do yard work!

Get ready for the spring pysch… here it comes!

Who am I kidding? I love yard work. It’s great exercise and everything always looks so nice afterward. I like to bag my yard, as it always looks so clean and neat, but mulching is better for it. Heckfire, I might even throw down some 15-5-10 fertilizer for my St. Augustine. Now that I think about it, it ain’t so bad. I’ll start on it tomorrow.