The Past 4,320 Minutes

Well, it's no dee-luxe apartment in the sky-hi-high, but it's mine. This weekend I moved into the new digs. On Friday evening, the truck-moving dude called to let me know what time he would be delivering our moving truck.

Him: Just calling to confirm that you ordered a truck.
Me: That's right.
Him: I will be there with the truck, 108 minutes from now.

One hundred and eight minutes. Not an hour-and-a-half, not two hours, but 108 minutes. When I told Nordic Boy about this, of course we had to set a timer at 108 minutes to see if the dude was serious. And we spent the rest of the evening announcing how many minutes each task would take. ("I'm going to pick up the take-out. I'll return in 17 minutes.") Because we're geeky like that.

By Saturday afternoon, we had moved everything in to the new place. Yippee! My enthusiasm was tempered a bit, however, by the fact that the yard resembled a rainforest. I mean, the type of landscape that you need a machete to cut yourself a pathway through. I wish I were exaggerating. I know that a big reason I could even afford this house was because the yard was in such bad shape that many potential buyers were scared off by it ("AHHH! THE TREES! SO MANY TREES! AAHHHH!"), which was lucky for me, but now that I looked at the green gone wild all around...yikes.

Luckily, I have my peeps who always, always come to the rescue when I need them. Hooray for my peeps! Saturday afternoon, HVD and JM showed up and practically did a tandem stage-dive into the wilderness that is my front yard. My yard is probably only about 25 feet long, but my house was literally not visible from the street because of the flowing flora between the sidewalk and the front door. We could have staged next season's Survivor from this little piece of greenbelt.

JM had brought with him a long, cutty pruner thingamading (see how much I know about gardening, people?) and went buck wild, Tasmanian Devil style. He cut back the entire front of the yard, with HVD in tow, pulling out roots with such gusto that I had to nickname her the Root Master.

On Sunday, Neighbor J and B showed up, along with Jenny. Now Jenny has long been reknowned in the art of weeding, and so I was sure glad to see her. She exhibited her usual weed-be-gone prowess, for which I am in awe of her. Neighbor J's particular talent was revealed to be the genteel art of plant-shaping like Mr. Scissorhands, which, with her artistic talents overall, didn't surprise anyone. Neighbor B had the very manly task of chainsawing some dead trees and stumps down (my yard sounds so classy, doesn't it?), and Nordic Boy's specialty was pruning the lower branches off of the really huge trees with this long-ass stick with a saw on the end of it. My contribution to this whole endeavor consisted mostly of bagging up all the crap that was being snipped, cut, pruned, and raked. May not sound like much, but we ended up with over 30 large bags full of yard waste. That's a lot of friggin' foliage.

So after all this effort, my yard is much more bald, much more pretty, and I actually get lots of lovely light in my windows to brighten up the place. And because the yard hadn't been loved like that for what looked like fifty years or so, we found lots of creepy debris among the mulchy goodness. These included: a rusty baton, a large rotted basket, a child's saddleshoe (we were relieved that the rest of the child was not found), some very old-looking beer bottles, a 1999 visa debit card, a car jack, and a small cow skull. Yep, I said a cow skull.

Maybe I should just throw in the towel with all this yard clean-up and be the scary, witchy librarian that the neighbor kids are scared of. Witchy Woman can be my new theme song. Gotta go dig that skull back out of the trash and practice my banshee cackle now.

Kiss the rings, I'm out.
Librarian Girl