Strange Complaints

Spring is here and of course that means it’s time for me to pretend I’m useful and immediately regret trying to do yard-work. Thanks to the storms that passed recently my back yard was beginning to look like marshland, so I broke out my lawnmower. Look, stop laughing.

Just because it doesn’t have an engine on it doesn’t mean it’s not a real lawnmower.

For some reason I have a fondness for those old reel-type mowers where it’s just some spinning blades in a helix that requires you to push and struggle like you’re about to have a heart attack, instead of a powered one.

Annnnyways, I got out my mower and immediately realized this was going nowhere as no matter how hard I pushed it wasn’t moving.

Charging up the batteries for my weed-eater I set about giving the yard a little trim off the top in order to see if that might help me actually push my push mower.

Considering it worked I’m going to say it was a solid plan overall, even though I think I actually did manage to give myself a few mini heart attacks pushing my mower through the dense grass still clinging desperately to life.

So far, despite being sore and exhausted, all was going okay…

That’s when I decided to open the back gate and look at the easement behind my fence.

If I’m being honest here I generally do not ever give the easement a second or even first thought, as I just generally tend to worry about my yard which is inside of the fenced area.

The small trees trying to grow through my fence from the easement, however, made me at least look and see what was going on back there.

Chaos.

Chaos is what was going on back there.

Despite gravity and arthritis stealing an inch from my height I’m still around 6’2” tall and the grass easily reached my waist…

Foolishly thinking that I should do something about that is how I wound up wounding myself this time around. At first all went well as I started waving my weed eater around like some kind of crazy man, and eventually got it cleared enough to walk around a bit. The walking around bit was the problem.

As soon as I confidently took a step forward a sticker vine wrapped itself snugly around my ankle and jerked me to an immediate stop. Gravity and the ground looked at me eagerly…

Thankfully, I was close enough to my back gate where I was able to throw out my left arm and catch myself from falling.. which meant my shoulder caught my entire body weight in one twisted motion.

It was not a fan.

Even now I can barely twist my arm at all and have difficulty raising my arm past shoulder height, which tells me I did a particularly good job of spraining it and an even better job of keeping up the annual tradition of wounding myself in the name of yard work.

Hopefully the man who’s handled my yard for years is able to come this week - he’s had surgery on his hip and so he’s been recovering and hasn’t had a chance to start up this spring, yet.

In fact that’s part of the reason i was out there because i didn’t want my hard to be the thing that undoes any good his surgery did for his hip.

Anyways, isn’t getting old fun? If you see me around town and wave don’t be too upset with me if I don’t (or can’t) wave back quite yet.

Until many tylenols later…