Raking Leaves

I grew up in California. I have never done yard work in my life with the exception of trimming the huge hedge back in Idaho at the house Dear Sir and I owned. I have mowed a lawn once.

So yesterday I thought that I was clever and helpful and wonderful. I raked the sea of fall leaves in my front yard with much optimism about the prospect of raking the backyard today (in my spare time). I raked like a mad woman. My wrist suffers some sort of carpel tunnel if I twist it some weird rack holding sort of way, and my back muscles are just ACHING. Oh my aching back. The kids came out yesterday to help me a bit too. Well, I sort of seethed if they did the wrong thing. I was on a mission. I was makin' piles, rakin' them on the tarp, and here you go, putting them away in the woods. Cool, huh? I was working hard. Real hard.

I cleaned out the shed in my whirl of cleaning madness and organized the whole thing. I put up shovels on nails, I found nice little places for playing balls, the scale (you remember it is in the shed so I won't weigh myself, right?), and other various things like peat moss and buckets and stuff. I even found a HUGE black widow spider perched up on some board in the corner of the shed. It was really huge. Very huge. Scary huge. The mother of all black widows. It was all splayed out looking very threatening. I decided to take a little piece of wood on the work bench and see if I could squish it. Yeah right. It CLICKED away. It made clicking sounds when it moved. Yikes. I know, I will murder a mole but a clicking spider freaks me out. I could not let it live though. I had to end it's life. I put on some gloves and got some acme bug spray. I slowly removed plank after plank of wood and sprayed like a madwoman. Finally I found it on the third plank, sort of curled up. Yick, yick. I sprayed it until I got it on the shed floor and stepped on it. Done.

I even defended my family yesterday.

So, I wake up this morning to my aching back and I sleepily opened the blinds to see my handiwork from yesterday. You guessed it, there was no handiwork. My yard was not even leaf-free for 12 hours! Probably not even six! I called Dear Sir in my despair and he laughed at me and said, "You don't have anything else to do; go do it again!"