With a 22-year-old house on almost 2 acres of land, you can bet that my list of things to do is rarely blank.  Today, for example, I had to prune a couple of trees that were once again brushing up against the house, charge the battery in the lawn mower, take some old cardboard boxes to the recycling place, and clean out the compost bin.  I’d mow the lawn, but with all the rain lately the backyard would just swallow the lawn mower.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.  Pruning the trees should have been a 10-minute job, but once I got the ladder and saw out, it seemed like a good idea to do it right and remove all the dead stuff I could get to, and also prune the branches that slap me in the face when I walk under the tree.  In general, if it’s less than 8′ off the ground, it goes.  With a dozen large oaks and dozens of other trees, this procedure can take days.  I guess next week will see me out in the yard with my chain saw.  My motto:  any day you get to start the chain saw is a good day.  Power tools are a benefit of home ownership.

The compost bin has a bunch of dirt in it from an excavation project a couple of months ago.  I needed to clean it out in order to make room for the grass and leaves that I’ll collect when I mow next week.  Nothing special here, except that the weed that was growing there turned out to be a potato plant.  One of the rotten potatoes we threw in the bin a couple of months ago sprouted, and now we’re two potatoes richer.  Lucky us.