This is where I spent most of my day – cleaning up this corner of the yard.

12 June 2008 – Thursday

Sometime after 4:30 I fell asleep for almost 3 hours. After breakfast I started on cleaning up the far Southeast corner of the yard. After 3 hours of pruning, weeding, raking, etc. It looks pretty good. What is interesting about this is that it is an area that only myself and the neighbors will really enjoy – Mary and the rest of the family hardly ever go up there. But I love it because it is quiet and cool even when it is really hot.

After lunch I managed a nap before heading out to work some more in the yard. While I was napping they delivered the new washing machine.

Frustration of the day – I put my gloves somewhere but a number of attempts to find them proved useless. I know they are sitting somewhere in plain sight – the problem is I have no idea where. The loss of the gloves limited what I could do for the rest of the day. I already have three wounds from getting too close to my work. Gardening can be dangerous.

As I work on a section it slowly emerges from chaos to a sense of order. In many cases the plants and weeds have grown together – in some cases it appears unchecked for a couple of years. I can well understand why – the yard is not an easy one to work. Especially the North hill and the SE corner. I spent most of the day on the SE corner and have most of it in pretty good shape. Now all I need to do is to get rid of all the debris – I will probably hire a crew to come in take it all away.

As the day goes on I work for shorter and shorter periods until I am just too tired to carry on. The cold and continual cough wipes out my strength in a couple of minutes. I decide the best thing I can do is eat some dinner, take a long, hot bath and try to go to sleep. The first two are easy but it seems too early for the latter.

Note: I stayed awake for about 30 minutes after writing the above before crashing. My body just gave up!