The Importance of Being Idle

Jinxed

It seems that the universe doesn't want me to do anything useful today, and who am I to resist the natural order of things?
Okay, so I gave up on vacuuming, quite reasonably, and decided instead to do some gardening. Now, I have an ambiguous relationship with gardening. I enjoy the work and all and I like the results on the rare occasions when my garden has looked good through my intervention. What I don't like about my garden in particular is that I can't go into it without all my neighbours feeling the need to come out and engage me in pointless and time-consuming conversation. Normally I'm all for pointless and time-consuming as you know, but I want my garden to be a private space dammit, so I wish they'd just leave me alone to get on with whatever it is I'm gonna do. Luckily (?) my voice is sore today almost to the point of rendering me mute, so after a few hoarse comments they left me alone. Unfortunately that was the point at which my lawnmower also decided it didn't want to work anymore, so I managed to mow a lawn and a half. And then it rained like it was the end of the world, so I just gave up.
Anyway, in the brief period when things were working, I wasn't being bugged by my neighbours and it wasn't raining, I was vaguely enjoying my garden labours, and realising that the reason I don't do more of it, and do it better, is that I really don't have the first clue what I'm doing out there. Which plants are good, and which ones aren't? I have no idea, they're all just... green... to me. Does having a flower make it a flower? I don't think so, I think a flower is just a part of the reproductive process of plants... That leaves me with what exactly? Lots of green things that I don't know what to do with. I pulled up loads of them almost at random, but it certainly looks a lot less cluttered than it did before, so that can't be bad. I don't think. And my lawn, jaysus, I KNOW that's a mess but I don't have the money to fix it (which is of course a common thread in most things right now) so what do I do? Just kinda cut it (until the mower gives up the ghost anyway) and... leave it. Its just fire-fighting really, trying to prevent disaster. Still, it was an interesting new insight into gardening, which was cool.

posted by BadMonkey @ 5:03 PM