Blown Fuse

So corny that it's good.

Pick of Destiny: have you seen it? It's one of those movies that certainly won't be winning any awards for...anything, but it's so fucking funny that it'll make your eyes water.

It's not funny in a "Man, it must have taken them days to write that joke!" way. It's funny in a crude-humor-cussing-starts-in-the-title-credits kind of way. It's totally worth the space it takes up in your Netflix queue, so check it out if you want to forget your day-to-day hassles for a while. As always, you could probably mute it and figure out what's going on just based on what Jack Black's eyebrows are doing.

(Aside: Damn it, I KNEW that was Meatloaf playing KG's dad! I'd recognize that voice anywhere.)

Fiskars rocks.

I bought a pair of Fiskars 5/8" pruners from Home Depot before we went on vacation. I took them home to be used immedately and handed them off to Scott who was in the back yard cleaning up some overgrown vines...or something.

I guess twenty minutes later Scott went to the front yard where I was trimming back bulb foliage to confront me about the clippers. Apparently the blades hadn't been properly forged and prevented them to close around branches the way they were made to.

I noticed on the back of the package that Fiskars offers a replacement warranty on their products. I sent them an email, and sure enough they replaced them NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

It's nice that there are actually companies out there that stand by their word without giving you a hassle in the process.

Tiiiiiimmmmbeeeer!

Um. I'm a creature of habit. Some people might actually go as far as to say that I can be anal retentive when it comes to having routines.

At work I like to do the same tasks in the same order every day so that I don't omit anything. If someone comes up to me and asks me to do some random task I get angry because it kills my flow.

When I come home I like to live routines at the door so that I can relax. Okay, I guess that's sort of a routine, too. My plan for today was to spend thirty minutes catching up on some work stuff and then fiddle a bit with a short story I've been trying to finish.

That dream sort of got squashed when I pulled into the driveway and saw a big ole piece of tree on the front lawn.

I have to admit that I was momentarily pissed because I really wanted to believe that one of the neighbors had dragged it over from their yard. Realizing that the very idea was silly and childish I went about cutting it up before too many people saw it. I knew Scott wouldn't be home before dark so it was either up to me or the termites to deal with it.

If you can't tell from the photo above, this is not a branch. It is was the top quarter of the left-most tree...one with a skinny trunk, but all the same it ain't a branch. It's about 18 feet long and it's a miracle it didn't fall on the roof.

As we don't own a chainsaw I cut it into four-foot segments with a hand saw. The people taking their dogs for walks were walking annoyingly slow past my yard as I flicked sweat off my brow and tried breaking tree with my bare hands. I know for a fact that my neighbor (one who walked by with dogs) owns a chainsaw. He couldn't offer to make the four necessary cuts to the damned thing to get it down to a manageable size? Where has all the chivalry gone? People think it's so fucking fun to look out the window (I'm not exaggerating) and watch their neighbors work like dogs, or else they find it satisfying that their yard is cleaner than yours.

If my hip were at 100% I would have just sawed through part way and then kicked the shit apart. I tried that once and....well, you remember that scene from Napoleon Dynamite where he tries going over the bike ramp? Well...imagine that, but in the scenario of an angry little woman jumping on a bowed branch.

It's done. There's my exercise for the month.

Gladious.

This is the first one to begin opening this season, and boy I planted a LOT of these. I didn't know which color this bag would be as they were marked as "assorted"...I guess I planted the all-orange ones right next to the house.

Now Showing in Theatres Near You.

Rhododendron.

Dirty Nails

We've had lots of yuck for weather this week, so all of the outdoor activities I meant to accomplish kind of got put on the backburner. I have a half-stripped piano out in the garage. Since the floor is still wet on one side in there, I don't feel like being bothered just yet.

I did, however, manage to get the rest of my summer-flowering bulbs planted. They'd been sitting in the garage waiting for a day where I had the energy and patience to finish. Since the ground was sort of soft from the torrential rains, they weren't much of a problem to put it. The only hurdle I ran into was a particuarly gnarly tree root that runs smack through a bed I'm trying to fill. *sigh*

Intuition tells me to get something sharp and to cut the mofo off. Common sense tells me that I'll wake up one morning with a tree on top of my car if I do.

I went to Home Depot this morning looking for bulb planter and one of those tree saws that come on a long stick to get those high branches. They had neither. They had loppers and post hole diggers, and that's it. My mistake was not buying the back and February when the had them in stock.

All they had were a bunch of gardening dilletantes clogging the aisles with baby strollers, buying tools that probably don't suit the job, and purchasing flats of perennials that their neighbors already have. I went in for something else, too, but immediately forgot what as soon as I walked through the door and saw all the warm-weather crazies.

The good news is that we now have 3 fewer leaves on the front lawn than we did this morning.

Jonquils are Up

I don't remember these from last spring....must have been dormant.

*clutches at heart*

I could tell that Terminix had been here by the big-ass footprints they left impressed into my already-too-compacted soil....that and the little white flags. Now, I understand they have to tread across certain places to get close to the foundation, but did they have to step right smack into the bed that is currently sprouting the early tips of my cannas? [shake your head "no"] Do I need to put up a knee-high barbed wire fence?

Poor babies. I have to go outside now and coddle them and tell them they're pretty or else they'll never come up.

At some point next week Terminix will be back to set up a fortress around the house to fend off the invading phalanxes of cockroaches water bugs. I can't say I'm excited about having so much poison around the house, but I have to say that I'm not particuarly fond of seeing large insects scuttle across my kitchen floor, either.

Grape Hyacinths are up.

I just love how they self-seed all over the place.