Gonna wake up any second now…

Yesterday I had a Bad Housework day. I worked for two hours straight and didn’t get through the entirety of my downstairs. This would be on account of because I haven’t been doing my housework in what might be considered a ‘timely manner’ (OK, OK, I haven’t done it AT ALL for about two weeks, and wasn’t being all that conscientious about things before that for quite a while), which has led to an excessive level of nastiness which means that a task that should take, say, twenty minutes tops is taking almost an hour and still ain’t right.

I didn’t have much hope for today’s task, which was yardwork. Which I have also not been getting around to for a few weeks. The back lawn looked more like the long grass plains of the vast Serengeti than a backyard lawn suitable for kid-frolicking. The two stupid hedges were sprouting forth in wild, un-ball-like profusion. Weeds were popping up between all cracks. Spider webs, lost concrete edges and wind debris, oh my!

But I figure hey, if I can just keep on chipping away at it during my two hours of Boo Bug being in preschool AND Captain Adventure taking a nap – eventually, I’ll make the headway and have a house I’m not embarrassed to have my mother see.

So I went outside, and I fired up the lawn mower, and hey, guess what? It looks like a lawn back there now! And then I found the extension cord (miracle #1) and figured out what was wrong with the weed whacker (miracle #2) and actually edged it – this would be the first time it has been edged in approximately, uh, well, let’s see. We moved in here back in about 1998…

I weeded my rose beds and sprayed the stuff I couldn’t pull. I fertilized the citrus trees, fixed the stupid hedges, mowed and edged the front yard, weeded and swept. Got scared right out of my skin by a black widow the size of Houston that had taken up residence in my ‘greens’ tote. OK, it wasn’t the size of Houston. More like…Austin. And the damned thing got away from me into a crevasse in the tote and I couldn’t smash it into the Black Widow Afterlife, which of course means that I will be obsessing about its existence for the rest of all time. Its web completely enveloped the whole inside of the tote!

Scarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry.

Then I actually sprayed weed-n-feed over the whole shebang and called it a day.

And it was only 2:00. I had forty-five more minutes before I had to go get Boo Bug, and Captain Adventure rather accommodatingly continued sleeping right up until it was time to leave. I had to wake him up to go – fortunately, he decided to forgive me when he saw the sippy cup of juice and got downright cheerful when he was handed a cookie.

My yard looks darned nice. Sure, I’ve still got a list of stuff like fertilizing the roses and planting new things up front and so forth and so on (and on and on and on), but it looks pretty darned nice.

I am pleased.

And, expecting that any second now, I’m going to wake up and it will 4:15 in the morning and time to start the tedious process of getting my husband out of bed…