I’m still sore.

This weekend was a yard work fest of unexpected proportions, and I worked my ass off.

My landlord had promised to come over and rip out the ugly shrub that blocks the view of traffic and the ancient shed in the backyard. I figured to help them, but I hadn’t counted on four dump loads—two with a 16-foot trailer.

We ended up ripping out five ugly shrubs in the front yard, leaving only the roses and a nice tree along the side. Connie said it was up to me to keep them or not, which surprised the hell out of me since she’s been the driving force in not changing anything since I’ve lived there. Marv pulled one of the stumps out with his truck, but the others are waiting for the big yank. I get to plant more roses in there, but I’ll wait until bare root season in January.

Then we started dismantling the shed in the back. Marv had recycled it from the Air Force 20 years ago, and I’d only used it to toss my old bike and some yard stuff into. I haven’t been able to get the doors open for at least three years, but I hadn’t tried very hard either. I figured there had to be a baseball-sized black widow in there by now.

Behind the shed and along the fence was where Marv had left some bricks and some wood for kindling. I was never real big on burning painted fence boards indoors, so I never used it, just put my own woodpile in front of it. Then when I broke my leg three years ago, I got behind on splitting and using the firewood, so some of it started to rot.

I’d moved all of the good wood to another location when the gardener did his cleanup last month, so everything left there was rotten. I took a load of very light, termite-infested antique wood to the dump, but when we got down to the bottom, it was so bad that we had to use rakes and shovels to get it out of there. The floor frame of the shed was just as bad; it looked like an archaeological dig since the gophers had thrown up dirt around the frame and the termites had eaten out the structure.

Two days of hard work later, and it’s all clean and we’re all sore and sunburned. I’m going to move some of the dirt to fill in the holes the dog has excavated, and then I’ll be done. My yard looks naked though. After I get back from the cruise, I’m going to plant some trees—maybe a nice Ash in the middle and some fruit trees along the back fence. It looks like I’ll be here a while, and I might as well make it pleasant to live in.