I'm not gonna try to list everything. Some things you don't need to know, some are boring, and I'll probably forget to mention some.
The neighbors got a yappy dog. The Mom there lets it out in the backyard as soon as the kids leave for school. It runs around barking all day long, It drives me crazy when I am in the backyard. It seems convinced it should kill me. Which is sort of funny, because if it somehow got in my yard I could strangle it with one hand. Not that I would, but if it died of natural causes or the family moved away, I wouldn't shed a tear.
And I suspect the Mom doesn't much love it either because as I said, she puts it out in the fenced backyard as soon a the kids leave for school. It must be maddening to have it in the house. I am surrounded by dogs on 3 sides. The yappy dog on the east, a large barky dog on the south (which desperately tries to get at me through the fence), and 2 large dogs to the west (which are at least mostly indoors and don't threaten or make much noise). But the east and south dogs make being in my backyard less pleasant than it should be.
Taxes were a misery last April. I fill out the H&R Block software forms, then tried to "finish" them. I kept getting a notification that I was "not on the network". Which was ridiculous because I was all over the internet otherwise. I wasn't going to try to call H&R Block just a few days before the filing date, so I filed for an extention and sent the Feds and State estimated additional tax payments to be safe.
The next day, I had my annual physical exam. Everything was fine. But 2 days later I woke up , got out of bed and fell to the floor with terrible right hip pain. Three days later, I had an appointment with my primary care doctor. He got me scheduled for a hip x-ray at the radiology lab in the same building (it's not a hospital but a combined medical center).
Guess who didn't have an x-ray technician on staff (vacant position for 4 months)? But the center had an emergency x-ray center a block away. They were alarmed at the results. They said I had either bone marrow or metastatic cancer. I went through a more detailed series of tests over the course of a month (needed a roller-walker to get around with difficulty), and was then referred to an oncologist and an MRI specialist to have more tests. 3 month waiting list...
But the pain went away after another (2nd) month. It became obvious that the problem was a very severe groin muscle injury that healed slowly. I felt perfectly fine again.
But that completely ruined my gardening season. By the time I could get around outside, I was late with my tomatoes, corn, and beans. I had ordered ten 10 gallon buckets (so I could put them in the sunniest part of the backyard) to plant them in and bought a small trailerload of 50/50 topsoil/compost to fill them. But by then it was June. I never got a decent crop of anything.
Funny thing about the trailerload of soil/compost. I have good at basic geometry. I calculated the cubic feet for 10 cylindrical buckets. Looked up the volume of the nursery bucketloader. It said I needed 2 bucketloads, so I went and bought 2.
The nursery apparently has a very wrong idea about the cubic feet the bucketloader delivers. I filled up all 10 buckets with only a 1/3 of it. Not knowing quite what to do with the other 2/3s, I covered the trailer with a tarp waiting for inspiration.
But before my hip injury, I had ordered about 500 various Spring bulbs. They arrived in mid November and sat in my chilly basement. I decided to smother the grassy weeds in the front yard island with standard brown packing paper, cover it with the trailer soil to hold it down, and then plant most of the island with the daffodils by using an auger to drill holes through when the paper was wet.
But that's a lot more work than it seems. Even mild breezes want to blow the paper around. So I bought 50 thin "bricks" to hold them down. I got the island all covered with bricked paper. Digging the trailer soil into buckets was harder than it used to be. I have probably never quite recovered from falling off the extension ladder in 2021.
I am happy to say that I emptied the trailer of the last of the soil mix and covered the paper inn piles and raked them carefully to smooth it out. We are supposed to get about 1.5" of rain the next 2 days, so the paper with be soft. I will use my auger to drill 200 holes for the new daffodils. Drilling holes with the auger is is not difficult. Dropping bulbs in the holes is not difficult. Raking the displaced soil back over them is not difficult. The hard work is done.
I scraped the trailer pretty well of all soil. The rain will clean the trailer of any leftovers. So I will finally be done with that project. Next is the crocuses and hyacinths. I think I will just plant them (rather than make metal cages). I'm just too tired these days. I still have some crocuses and hyacinths surviving after 10 years (that the voles have never found) so I'l just hope for another 10 years. By then I probably won't be able to do much landscaping anyway.
