Field work

Have I mentioned before that, much as I adore long weekends, coming off of them frequently throws me for such a loop that at the very least the long weekends seem to accomplish nothing in terms of refreshing and recharging my ever-addled mind? I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that before, but see above re: addle-pated-ness.
The crazy thing of course is that I kind of wanted to blog all weekend long. There were a few stray thoughts rattling around that I could have strung together in Grab Bag fashion, and a lot of catalogs begging to be scanned came in late last week, and even Monday was eventful, but the whole three-day, federal huh-liday (i.e. “Oh, uh, I guess we should be grateful for Christopher Columbus or something, huh?”) weekend came and went in a bit of a blur. Still let’s see if we can quickly get back up to speed. I should warn in advance, though, that I foresee the remainder of this week’s posts, including today, blending together and blurring categorical lines, because a lot of what I’ve been thinking about hits all my wheelhouses in rapid succession, so …

There was an awful lot of work going on for a three-day weekend, but all of it to one extent or another necessary. My wife of course works weekends, sometimes, and usually in an all-or-nothing fashion where either both Saturday and Sunday require her to put in slightly truncated shifts at the clinic, or else she’s off from Friday night until Tuesday morning. This time, though, special arrangements were made because my wife had a baby shower to attend on Saturday, followed by a normal workday on Sunday (and next weekend she’ll work a shift on Saturday but have Sunday off, and thereafter it should be more or less back to all-or-nothing normalcy). And Monday is always my wife’s day off, but every few months or so she is the on-call doctor for a week’s worth of nights, fielding after-hours phone calls to either dispense such medical advice as can be given based on telephonic diagnoses, or to advise clients to get their pet to a 24-hour emergency vet. She started her on-call week last night, and found herself answering a couple of pages, thankfully only one of them after bedtime (and just barely).

But the main work was literally around the homestead as we spent chunks of time on Saturday, Sunday and Monday working on our lawn and landscaping. The amount of progress we made over the course of the three days was fairly gratifying, including but not limited to: aerating and overseeding parts of the main front lawn; tearing up by the roots the entire jungle of weeds growing in the corner between the front side of the shed and the side of the house (dubbed Weedpocalypse I by my wife, as opposed to Weedpocalypse II which is on the opposite side of the shed and still being dealt with, but at least that’s more hidden from the street view); planting a new bush and some ground cover in the de-weeded corner; and also planting like 99 bulbs in various garden spots around the yard, and mulching over top of them. Of course this all required several trips to various nurseries and home improvement stores and the buying of everything from a bale of straw to bed down the grass seeds to a gas-powered tiller, which I mention only because that added to the total amount of sheer manhours required to get everything done (and let us not forget that most of this was done also while wrangling the high-spirited young heir of the estate).


So much soreness and exhaustion resulted, in addition to a non-insignificant amount of dehydration, because sweet scorching Surtr was it warmish this weekend. We felt markedly under the gun to get as much of the landscaping repairwork done over the holiday weekend as possible because soon enough it will be too cold to be digging in the dirt or trying to transplant new flowers and whatnot, but you wouldn’t have known winter was a matter of single-digit weeks away from the high-80’s hot sunshine Virginia was getting the past few days. The little guy actually spent a fair amount of time in his inflatable swimming pool as happy as could be, and this morning I noticed a slight farmer’s tan on the back of my neck. I actually maintain that if it had to go to one unseasonable extreme or the other, I’d prefer digging and planting and watering and raking and whatnot when it’s warmer than when it’s colder, because the latter makes me even more miserable. But still, it made everything that much more of a trial.

Nonetheless, I believe the consensus is that it was worth it, because the property overall looks a lot better, and my wife and I – as homeowners and members of the neighborhood – feel less like derelict slackers who can’t maintain a baseline amount of yard maintenance. When my wife and I recover enough energy to have a proper conversation I’ll be sure to check if that is in fact what she thinks as well.