June 05, 2023

Greetings Laff Lovers,

Yesterday the wife and I performed our biannual front yard maintenance. We do it biannually because we're too lazy to do that much work every year.

The front of the house is dominated by several large evergreen bushes, the biggest of which is one of those boxwood shrubs that's about 12 feet long by 50 inches tall. The thing is a monster. It's a beautiful piece of landscaping when it's trimmed, but when it gets unruly it makes the house look abandoned.

I take my cue from when I can't see out of the front window anymore. When that happens, like it did this spring, it's time to get out the loppers and the electric trimmers and go to work.

The worst part is forcing my way between the shrub and the front of the house. There should be about an 8 inch gap between the bush and the house, but when it gets overgrown the gap is effectively 0. So wearing jeans and a long sleeve shirt to keep myself myself from getting torn to shreds, I fired up the trimmer and began carving my way in.

The dust, the sweat, the scratches; all of those are unpleasant, but what I could really do without is the spiders. That bush is like an apartment complex for them. But eventually I achieved a nice, flat edge all along the back... and the indiscriminate massacre of an uncounted number of spiders. After that it was just another 20 minutes of squaring up the top, sides and front. That's the tricky bit, because I have to step back a number of times to make sure I'm not trimming the bush into a rhombus.

Another hour of trimming the rest of the shrubs back into shape, then raking up the trimmings, bagging them, and finally pressure washing the front porch and walkway, and the wife and I ended up putting in 10 man hours.

Standing on the front lawn admiring the freshly manicured and tidy-looking landscaping I said to the wife, "Looks good. Now we can ignore it for another two years."

Email: joe@gopher-news.com

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