Speaking of working steadily at a task that feels endless (as we were yesterday), I have been slowly making my way around the yard hand-weeding some planting beds that have been allowed to go to seed.
The original plan was to keep these areas heavily mulched and carefully tended to provide some space where flowers, ornamental grasses, trees and bushes could thrive. And at first, that’s how it worked. But over time the mulch dissolved (as expected) and while I was looking the other way, the beds have filled in with misshapen, spiky intruders from Mars.
I could go after the invaders with a noxious chemical cocktail, but that’s a solution for cowards. I need to confront the weeds personally, face to frond. Besides, there is always a risk that any foliage killer I spray on unwanted greenery will drift off and murder the more upstanding flora I’m trying to protect. I suppose it’s like keeping a loaded gun in the house. With very little effort you can do more damage than the threat you armed yourself against at the beginning.
These photos show you the scope of the task.
My approach is simple and brutal. I drop to my knees and claw at the Earth with a three pronged hook held in my right hand. As the soil is loosened I grab the weed with my left hand and toss it into a bucket. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. If it sounds “old school”, you’re right. This is basically the technique our prehistoric ancestors used to spiff things up around the entrances to their caves. I flung myself at the problem for several hours straight on Saturday, all the while wondering what possible good could come of it.
In the sandy areas, scurrying ants reproached me for destroying their cities. I tried to explain that I was down here with them because I was withholding my support from Monsanto, but the ants were too busy running in panic to pay me much mind.
I continued to dig. After an hour, I found it very difficult to stand up straight. After two hours, I had a sense that if I suddenly keeled over, the weeds could reclaim everything before I was cold.
Weeding must be the opposite of teaching. You can see immediate results, but you can be pretty certain your work will have absolutely no effect at all on the future.
To which pointless chore have you given too much of your time?
Trail Baboon 
Good morning. Good work taking care of those weeds without using a chemical weed killer, Dale. Next time don’t wait so long to get to them because it is much easier to get rid of them when they are small. I can’t resist giving gardening advice.
Painting my house is the task I do that falls in the seemingly pointless chore category. There is no end to painting when the whole outside of the house needs painting every few years and there is also a lot to do inside. The windows and trim are the biggest problem because the wood is getting old and does not hold paint very well. Some of the widows should be replaced. We have been trying to get by without spending money on new windows.
At this point we will not replace any of the windows because we are going to sell the house. So it’s scrap off the deteriorating paint, put on primer, and then another layer of paint for all the widows as well as getting to other places that haven’t been painted recently. I’ve done this many times. However, this could be the last time if we can get this house sold. Sad to say, there is at least one spot that is in need of paint on the house that will be our new home in S. Minneapolis.
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Have you picked the home already, Jim, or is that decision still open? I think I remember that you have already chosen the home. When I bought my home I was too dumb about home maintenance to understand what a jewel I was getting. My home is stucco. Stucco doesn’t need to be painted. My neighbors have had to paint three times in the years I’ve been here.
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The house we will move to is a bungalow, but no stucco. it would be good to have stucco.
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Steve will tell you, I have serious bungalow envy. My little cottage is nice enough, and would be nicer if I spent too much time on certain routine chores and up-keep stuff, but there is something about that attic access, or for that matter the idea of “upstairs” that calls to me. I have no idea why.
Don’t even get me started on the fireplace and built-ins.
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MIG, we are also fans of bungalows and happy to have found one. It has some built in cabinets and nice woodwork. It Also has a brick fire place and the sort of post and bean look of bungalows without the half timbers usually found on those with stucco. Unfortunately the original wood siding has been covered with some other kind of siding. I think it is metal siding which has already been painted at least once.
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
1. I love to weed–it gives me a feeling of control in a world in which I have little. Dale, a weed eater might be a good investment! For those edges they cannot be beat. We have a hill of hostas which only is weeded by the weed eater.
2. Balancing the checkbook to the penny. Gave up on that one.
3. Cleaning house–got a cleaning lady.
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I’ll have to think about the pointless chores I do. The sad fact is that more and more chores seem pointless, and the sadder fact is that I do them less and less. Shouldn’t there be a governmental program to assist senior citizens too lazy to wash the dishes?
Meanwhile, I want to commend you Dale for being so up-to-date with your weed program. These days we call what you do “unfronding” the weeds.
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Hah! Just think, I could have wasted all those hours on Facebook instead!
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doing the garden digging the weeds
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when im sixty four sounded a ways off back then didnt it.
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Oh, my, it certainly did seem a long way off. I am older than my most of my teaching friends, and when I had my birthday I sang this from time to time during the day, and they just laughed. But their time will come. (Because I started teaching later in life, I will be teaching for a while yet because I can’t afford to quit!) Dale’s comment about teaching certainly fits – many days feel as though little has been accomplished, but overall you do feel that you have done something.
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Who could ask for more?
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Dale wrote, “Weeding must be the opposite of teaching. You can see immediate results, but you can be pretty certain your work will have absolutely no effect at all on the future. ”
That is wonderfully true. It explains a lot about how I felt for the 35 years I taught and how I feel now about my former career. Thanks for the insight.
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And I thank my son for the insight, Ken. Just this week he’s beginning his second year teaching math to high school seniors in Memphis.
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School starts the first week of August in Memphis?
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Oops, that ABD is me.
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Believe it or not Anon/Edith, it does. They don’t have to wait for the State Fair to be over before they can begin!
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i saw that his program for teaching teacerhs is under the microscope. hope it works out ok . i guess he already got his huh?
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Morning-
Wow, what a question. The first thought is why would I even do a pointless chore?? Sounds like something the military would come up with…
For a few years I was the ‘Downstairs Janitor’ at the civic theater in town. I grew to hate the job because I could empty the garbage and wash the mirrors and vacuum the floors and people would just come back in and mess it up again.
The cart wranglers at the grocery or big box stores; ‘I keep taking all the carts in and you haul them all out again!’ It would make me crazy.
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When I was an adolescent I spent a lot of time doing palm presses and wall presses to increase the size of my bust. Needless to say they were futile exercises for the intended purpose. I did, however, receive many compliments for my palms and elbows.
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i was wondering whether my blogging should be raised here or not?
if it feels good it is ok is one criterria, the arts… performances disolves into the vapors. getting high, making love watching a comedy all so transitional but what is life but a choice about how to spend it?
dale. whay are we here?
what is lifes true meaning.
look what weeding the garden can do to a guys brain, his life , his soul.
thats it no more weeding…..
or maybe lots more weedig.
i will have to think about that…..
and blogging
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Believe it or not, while pulling weeds I began to understand George W. Bush’s professed love for going back to the Texas ranch and clearing brush during his presidency. Any executive who has to sort through serious issues and make difficult decisions involving hard-to-understand details would naturally be drawn to the simplicity of thinning out the uncomplicated thicket, don’t you think?
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let me get home to my garden and ill lety you know. i cant decide right now.
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whoops. i liked donnas comment and was going to comment on how i have wondered how she got such well defined elbows but got sidetracked off to existentialism on route.
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As a sometimes master of inappropriate posts, I shouldn’t handle this topic even with plastic gloves and long metal tongs. But I’ll go for it anyway. I’ve was intrigued by a story that came out of the filming of “The Slums of Beverly Hills.” Actress Natasha Lionne was fitted with a prosthesis that gave her an exaggerated bosom. After filming with it one day, she decided on a lark to show off her new figure by walking around town among strangers. She came back to the studio hours later shattered and in tears, for she had never anticipated the impact of so much unwanted attention from so many undesirable men. She couldn’t wait to get out of it.
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To which pointless chore have you given too much of your time? Now, you leave my day job out of this!
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well said. I’ve been trying to figure out how to put the endless pursuit of cash that goes to pay for necessary utilities and services. Too much of that fee goes to line the pockets of executives and investors as compared with the actual cost of the utility and/or the wage of the person actually performing the service.
There are days when it just seems like I am endlessly engaged in the exercise of acquiring that money so I can just keep lining those pockets.
My free-lance production work does not so much feel that way.
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“My freelance production work does not feel that way.” It is nice to have a product at the end of work, isn’t it?
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I’m sure that many of the lessons taught in schools are useful. On the other hand, there are times when students seem to be required to “jump through hoops” for no reason. I don’t think any of the teachers who make comments here would want their students to do pointless “hoop jumping”. School can seem like a pointless task when you are in one of those classes where a lot of “jumping through hoops” is required.
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Keeping the dining room table clear. It just doesn’t pay. I have tried different strategies to keep it tidy and eventually it descends to enough chaos that there isn’t room to actually use it as a dining room table. Every week or so I go through the piles that appear and triage, but I swear the paper re-seeds itself. It’s as bad as creeping charlie (without the saving grace of little purple flowers). I think I shall cease to call it a table and call it an extended desk, flat file and recycling bin that occasionally gets eat upon.
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Pointless chores?? I’d say vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing tile floors, and washing windows. For most of my life, performing these tasks felt rather uplifting afterwards. Now they feel pointless unless I’m having company (which is rare). Even then, I begrudge doing them. Recently, my well water’s begun to produce a layer of fine, white sand – not a good sign given that my 300′ deep, 100-year old well may need replacing to the tune of half a year’s income. Suddenly, using water for cleaning has become a luxury, especially after being told that until the problem’s fixed, I should just take a bar of soap to the lake to bathe and haul up buckets of water to flush the toilet! I find it annoying that “deep cleaning” can’t just be done twice a year or so and stay done. To my credit, I do keep the cottage picked up at all times. When I find myself shoulding about deep cleaning, all I have to do is remember how much easier life is that my hoarder wasband is gone!
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One of my problems is that thing about how nobody ever visits my home, so nobody will be bothered by the disorder. I used to joke that my housekeeping was designed to not offend an English setter, the only witness to how things are here. Now the English setter is gone, and I’m finding that my standards actually have slipped.
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time for another dog with standards that can be introduced in puppyhood when they dont know any better.
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I keep telling you Steve, fostering. We just returned Peachisson and now have another black kitten for our resident kitten to train in the ways of mayhem.
So far, little Dolce is unimpressed with the Kitten-who-cannot-be-named. Fortunately, he takes no offense. What a great cat.
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shes right steve. a cat would be better or at least siompler for yu right now . i am just not sure the payback is correct. there arent any cats ive ever met that bond in the same way as dogs. ive only got one or two friends who i am as close to as i am my dogs. thats odd but true.
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I’ve never met a kitten that needed ANY training in ways of mayhem. Maybe I’ve just been lucky?
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kittens turn into cats at 6-9 months
dogs stay puppies for a long long while
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I had a cat once that was a total affection-junkie. None of this attacking bare feet and ankles, just lots of cuddling and purring.
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Feeling compelled to read every blasted entry on facebook from the last time I left off. Hours, I tell you, hours. And for what?
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The weeds are really something to contend with this year, aren’t they? Or is it just my imagination? I had the luxury of help weeding my garden earlier in the season, but then Benji announced that he was taking a month off from gardening and went camping. So here I am, waging a lone and losing battle against a bumper crop of crabgrass, creeping bellflower, creeping Charlie, and Queen Anne’s lace that I was frivolous enough to seed a few years ago. What was I thinking? To make matters worse, husband, in an attempt at being helpful, had at the shrubbery with en electric hedge trimmer. These shrubs have received the worst haircut ever! My yard is an embarrassing mess!
Meanwhile, inside the house everything is getting hairier and hairier, I can now attest to why it’s called “fur”niture.” Neither my old back nor my Eureka pet vacuum are up to the pointless task of keeping up with Daisy’s shedding. I’ve come to appreciate the vast difference between what a wire-haired
dachshund and an 80 pound yellow lab shed.
Spent the day in the emergency room waiting for test results. Husband now waiting for surgeon and anesthesiologist to arrive to remove his gallbladder. Guess I’ll take a nap.
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hope the day gets better. sounds like that is extremely likely
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Ouch!
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Good luck to both of you!
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Thanks, Steve. I’ve just learned that they’ll keep overnight for observation with surgery scheduled for tomorrow at 8 AM. He’s bored, tired, and hungry, but otherwise seems to be holding up well under the circumstances.
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Any chore that tackles weeds, dirt and grime, animal fur, or feeding hungry people. Sometimes I can’t believe how much time I spend on things that are 1) never finished and 2) have to be done again several times a day or week.
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WOT: Does anyone remember if there is a way to see all of Mpls. from the top of the IDS tower anymore?
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I haven’t thought that there was for a long time. You can go to the top of the Foshay but I’ve never done it. Hey, a long or short term goal, easily accomplished.
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No, the public can no longer access the top of the IDS tower. All has been converted to executive penthouse offices.
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you can go see my attourney on the seconfd to the top floor . he looks north northwest west. john c james
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIEakypcZr8
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Trying to get students to use voice control. I finally learned first graders have just two levels of volume – loud & very loud.
Nice to see the positive comments about teaching. May there always be people like Gus willing to enter the profession.
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amen
i was saved by a great mentor who guided me through school in my teens. and a couple of really wonderful young teachers who made jr high school a huge experience after coming out of the nunnery through my grade school thrashings and medievil visionaries in penguin suits. i considered teaching with my idealinst stage and then went off to the next thing before settling on my free flow entrepreneurship interning. i am almost finished with now. i should be ready to start any day now.
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i had a good friend who came form honduran background and went back to teach, he said there teachers are considered the greatest valued citizen in the community. they have a status equal to doctors
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
– Annie Dillard
This is a quote I have on a little plaque that was given to me as a gift. I think it is supposed to be inspirational, but on certain days it can be somewhat depressing.
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