Finished, in so many ways

We did yard work today. I did not particularly feel like doing yard work today, but it really needed doing. Also I was a bit troubled by some little piles of dirt I’d begun seeing. Little piles of dirt that made no sense. They weren’t anthills. They weren’t children digging. I had this dreadful feeling that they were going to be due to burrowing rodents.

Right off this morning, I noticed that a patch of thriving kidney beans…was now a kidney bean plant. And a lot of empty spaces where formerly there had been kidney beans. With quite a few new odd little mounds of dirt. Suspicious…

So I poked around until I found the tunnels. And then I said a few very salty words about it.

The damned gophers have found my garden. Awesome.

So we agitated things out there to make it clear that this was a bad place, a VERY bad place, you don’t want to live here, because it is BAD, VERY, VERY BAD.

I do not like killing things I am not going to eat.

And I do draw the line at gophers. Gopher a-la CrockPot is simply not going to be on the menu any time soon. So I really hope the “kick up a fuss and make them feel really unsafe” method works, and we don’t have to escalate the warfare any further.

And then I did a lot more weeding and digging, and digging and weeding, and replacing of broken sprinkler-things, and cleaned up some areas that have needed it for a really long time.

Several hours later, I stood soaked with sweat and regarded the fruit of my labor.

And then I may have cussed a little bit, because I was done-with-a-capital-D-Done for the day, but could still see a two-sided, tightly written 8-1/2x11 sheet of paper’s worth of things I really ought to get done out here in front of me.

Which is always the way of it. The garden is something that is never “done.” There’s always something starting, and something finishing, and something that needs weeding, and something needing harvesting.

A big old never-ending circle of chores. (Ha. You thought I was going to say ‘life,’ didn’t you!)

MEANWHILE…you know That Thing that happens with knitting sometimes, where you knit and knit and knit, but never seem to get anywhere?

I was starting to think the shawl was going to be the last project I ever did. Because I was going to DIE before I finished it.

But, suddenly…I went around the last corner. And then I was running in ends. And then I did a fast-block with it (dampen and lightly stretch, but not the full pin-out) (because it is going to need an actual washing, and it is both too late at night to be starting All That, and I am too stiff and sore to be crawling around dealing with 6,000 pins at the moment thank you very much)

I think I’m going to like this one.

It isn’t so fancy that you feel like you should be dressing “up” to wear it, the colors are friendly enough to play nicely with a lot of other earth-tones…I can see actually wearing it on my way to work.

Even though I’m probably wearing brown denim pants.

And possibly Thundercats sneakers.

Just to give the, like, one or two people tops who would actually notice something to gossip about for the rest of the day.