Garden of Eden

What a week end around this joint.  Saturday morning I wrestled a monster Thatching Machine around the yard.  Have you ever done that?  If not, I'm gonna give some advice on the proper way to operate one of those babes.  All I learned can easily be summed up in six words.   Pay someone younger to do it. 

It really is impossible to put into words just what a couple of hours at the controls of the vibrating, clanking,  spinning and out of balance blades, located just below a balky engine that refuses to restart without reading to it from a Steven King book about machines that take over the world, will do to a persons entire body.  The first affected body parts are the fingers, hands and wrists.  The fingers go numb.  The hands start to clinch into fists, that cannot be opened without the use of a crowbar, caused when some sort of abused muscle mass somewhere in the immediate vicinity starts going into spasms.  The wrists?  Oh, all they do is jerk to and fro for an hour or so after the machine has been returned to the rental place. 

Arms somehow manage to turn to jelly.  And the back?  Don't even go there.  Whatever of it survives the evil hammering is destroyed picking up and loading the monstrosity for transport.  Actually, that's the best part of the whole deal.  You see, all the nerves running from the legs to the pain center in the brain get confused while transiting the contorted spine, and about the most they are able to tell the brain is that some legs are more or less attached to the torso in some way.  No more information can be transmitted, so no pain what soever is associated with that area of the body.

After running the machine into every tree on the property several times, and after running over, instead of along, every border in an unconscious attempt to determine if I could, at some later date, use it to break concrete, I finished pulling most of the thatch from it's nicely concealed location below the grass to a place on top of the grass where it could easily be seen by anyone who happened to pass by at anything less than a half mile distance.  What an eyesore.  And just think, I had paid good money to rent this Devil Machine just so my manicured lawn could be destroyed.  My wife is correct.  There are more rocks in my head than there are in the entire state of New Hampshire.

I cursed it as it was loaded and carted back to the hell from which it came, and returned just in time to overhear the neighbors as they commented on the sanity of people who move from New Mexico to Oregon.   I smiled and said hi, pretending not to hear the comments on the size of my gray matter, and walked into the garage where my trusty rake is stored. 

I also have boxes and boxes of black 55 gallon trash bags stored in the garage, courtesy of the trash collection department of the town where I used to live.  Those good people knew that I would need them one day, and included two boxes each year in my trash bill.  Most of those boxes were unopened and moved with us so I would be sure to have an over full garage here.

Two Hydrocodon/ATAP 10mg/650 pills later, there was a pile of 19 of those bags filled with raked thatch in my garage where it will start to mold and produce obnoxious odors long before I recover sufficiently to haul it to the dump.  The Sun was starting to set on my labor so I ordered a pizza for delivery, ate and we retired.

Sunday morning came WAY to soon - I started the day with another of the bluish pills and I washed it down with a cup of coffee.  An hour or so later the pill gave me the courage I needed to finish the job.  I went back to the hell where the machines are located and rented a combination  Aerator/Bodybreaker.  In comparison, this machine was a pleasure to use.  As long as you don't count the rose thorn. 

That's right, the rose thorn.  Before it was buried deeply in the end of my right index finger, it was attached to the bush I ran over with the Aerating Godzilla.  I quickly managed to stop the machine and quiet the beast so I could dig a hole in my finger with my trusty Leatherman blade. I thought I got it all out, so I completed the lawn and returned the machine.  I took yet another of the pills and, due to the magical power of modern medical miracle drugs, thought no more of my aching back nor of the quarter inch piece of rose thorn that remained undetected in my finger. 

This morning I woke with a finger half again as large as usual, and it hurt like the Dickens.  I dug around a bit, then decided a trip to the Doctor was in order.  I never wait til the little red lines start running towards the heart.  The one time I waited til then was enough to convince me this type of thing can get real serious real quick.  The Doc agreed, shot some good numbing stuff into the finger, dug around some and then showed me what I had missed. 

The finger's healing, the lawn looks pretty good, and I'm gonna have to fight off Adam and Eve if they see it next week.