No more time for prograsstinating

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/05/2018 (2979 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What with the Jets getting bounced from the Stanley Cup playoffs, I am running out of excuses for not doing yardwork.

There I was on the holiday Monday, lying on the couch in the den, staring mindlessly at our big-screen TV, when I heard my wife’s desultory tones drifting in from the kitchen.

“Honey!” she called out.

“You should think about cutting the lawn.”

What with being a crusading journalist, I replied instantly. “I AM thinking about it, dear,” is what I hollered back.

I could hear my wife’s eyeballs rolling all the way from the kitchen. “I mean you should stop thinking about it and actually do it,” she replied in the sort of tone you would use if you were speaking to a houseplant.

I decided to use logic on her. “I’d love to but I can’t right now because I’m waiting for football season to start,” I pointed out.

To cut a long column short, this was when my spouse, She Who Must Not Be Named, strode into the den and fixed me with the sort of laser-beam glare that most guys of my gender have experienced at some point.

Which is when I got off the couch, walked to the back door and began staring at our lawn, which I decided was not long enough to cut because I could still see the tippy top of the funny hats on our garden gnomes.

I am going to shock all of you now with a surprise confession — I am not a big fan of yardwork.

I have nothing against people who enjoy gardening and lawn maintenance; it’s just that I don’t think it’s a good hobby for everyone. For instance, I don’t think it’s a good activity for sane people.

Out of journalistic fairness, I will point out that I am familiar with people who hold a different point of view on this sensitive issue.

For example, I know one guy who is so in love with his gardening and yard implements that he has built special hooks for them so that he can hang each tool in a place of honour on his garage wall.

Seriously, when he is not actively using these tools, he will sometimes take a cup of coffee and stand in his garage, looking admiringly at each precisely hung implement as though he were staring at the Mona Lisa or a print of Dogs Playing Poker.

My wife is much the same in the sense that, in her heart of hearts, she wants to have the sort of lawn that our neighbours will look at with envy. Instead, we have the worst lawn in the neighbourhood, a patchy stretch of scrub grass so pathetic that it is routinely subjected to what I like to refer to as “drive-by sneerings.”

My only real job is to cut the grass, which requires me to operate our gas-powered mower, an antiquated machine that, if it had operating instructions, they would read like this:

Step 1 — Yank the cord as hard as you can;

Step 2 — Swear at the mower using salty words that cannot be reprinted in a family newspaper;

Step 3 — Continue yanking the cord until (a) your arm detaches from your shoulder; or (b) the mower spontaneously bursts into flames.

You think I am joking about the lawnmower catching fire, but I am not. More than once I have been pushing this (bad word) device across our lawn when it will begin to emit clouds of smoke and caked-on clods of hardened grass covering its exterior will ignite.

In these cases, I will generally retreat to the safety of the house, where I will ask my wife whether a flaming lawn mower is the sort of household emergency that can be resolved by wrapping it up in duct tape.

Fortunately, I am only expected to do a minimal amount of raking. I am not overly fond of mowing, but I truly hate raking our lawn, largely because it’s composition breaks down as follows: 1) 10 per cent grass; 2) 38 per cent dog waste; 3) 47 per cent dirt and gravel; and 4) 83 per cent dried-up squirrel carcasses, anthills and pieces of hose that I mowed over last summer and forgot to pick up.

The main reason I am opposed to raking is that it stirs up huge plumes of blinding dust, much like that Hawaiian volcano that most of us have been watching on the TV news.

My big concern is that the dust clouds caused by raking will make it impossible to find my way back to the fridge in the kitchen, where most of our cold beer supplies are stored.

But I am not the sort of journalist who likes to spend an entire column complaining.

No, I want to spend part of this column passing on important tips for people like me who hate gardening that I discovered on the HGTV Canada website.

Tip No. 1 — Replace your lawn with artificial turf, just like at a pro football stadium. I will tell you right now that every guy within the sound of my voice has thought of this at some point in time, but the genius idea has been flatly rejected by that guy’s spouse;

Tip No. 2 — Use empty beer bottles as “edging” to mark where your garden ends and where your lawn begins. You could use empty wine bottles if you want to be even classier;

Tip No. 3 — Create more outdoor living space, which means you need to fill up your yard with decks, patios and gazebos to the point where there is almost no yard left to maintain;

Tip No. 4 — Spray your mower with vegetable oil, such as Crisco. You think I am making this tip up, but I am not. It will not only prevent cut grass from sticking to your mower, it will also allow you to cook burgers and hotdogs on top of the engine, which can come in handy if you get a big crowd on Canada Day;

Tip No. 5 — Hire a lawn service. The only problem with this tip is the fact that you would have to pay for people to come and do all the work that you don’t want to do.

On the other hand, if you return all those empty beer bottles lining the edge of your garden you should have enough cash to pay for a lawn service and, possibly, install a pool, which will also cut down on mowing time.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to emptying some of those cold beers in the fridge, because our flower garden is not going to “edge” itself.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca