2025, Family, gardening, home, Nature, work

I Think I Can, I Think I Can

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If you noticed that I didn’t have a presence on the Trail on Saturday, it’s because it was stump removal day.  The tree itself had all been cut down by Friday evening so Saturday was all about the stump.

We had a couple of offers to help us yank the stump out with a truck (thank you, tim and my neighbor Don) but with my front yard garden flourishing this year and some of the perennials starting to bloom, YA and I didn’t want to risk trashing those; hence the decision to utilize the “dig to China” method of stump removal.

You ever have one of those times when you’ve taken something on and as you’re working on it you start to question your sanity?  The first couple of hours went fine – the beginning of the work and you’re still full of optimism and energy.  By lunchtime, we were lagging a bit so we took a break and ate sandwiches on the front steps.  I will admit that I did google “stump removal” before we got back to business.

By 2 p.m., I was seriously thinking about having myself committed.  We’d been digging down around the stump for hours, cutting roots whenever we came upon them and even with both of us with our backs to the house and pushing vigorously, the stump wasn’t moving at all.  At this point, my mantra was “We can do this because we’ve done it before” – a little like Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azkaban – since I had been part of the stump removal team when my wasband and I took down a tree when we first bought the house. See:

The Chainsaw Massacre | Trail Baboon

So YA and I just kept digging; by this point we were more excavating than digging as we were trying to get under as much of the root system as possible.  I really did say to myself “we’ve done this before” repeatedly. 

Suddenly at 3:15, when we shoved it, it moved.  So we shoved a little harder, then there was a good sized “cracking” sound.  At this point I shoved and YA got underneath with the chainsaw and finished off the last root holding it and voila!  At 3:20 the stump was out.  It was a little stunning since it seemed like we’d be digging forever and then suddenly we were done.   We rolled the stump down to the boulevard and since we are both good at cleaning as we go, we only had to put all the various tools back on the porch.  You can’t really tell from the photo but I was just about the dirtiest I’ve ever been from a yardwork project – maybe even dirtier than when tim and I sandblasted to porch.  I had to take a scrub brush and the hose to myself in the backyard before I could even go in the house.  Then it was a shower with another scrub brush and a LOT of body wash. 

We finished up the work on Sunday – digging up the area and leveling it out.  We did find the black edging that I put down decades ago as well as the various layers of black tarp that truly did not do anything about weeds.   Now we have two pretty little Dwarf Globe Blue Spruce planted that will not grow above the window level and should fill the space nicely.  To make it look a little prettier for now, we also put in a few hostas as a minimal border.  I told YA as we were inspecting our handiwork yesterday that I was never, ever going to do that job again. 

Ever.

Do you have any mantras that have been useful in your life?

29 thoughts on “I Think I Can, I Think I Can”

  3. Whoa, VS! I can’t believe you two tackled that!

    “What was I thinking??” comes to mind (and is in line with your experience!)

    Another one that works when I’m dreading something…
    “By this time tomorrow, I will be on the other side of this.”

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  4. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    For the last month my mantra has been, “Move slowly. One thing at a time.” I found that I was getting so frustrated with how long everything was taking, post-surgery. Then I would catch myself because it did not matter how long things were taking. Recovery mattered. When I do one thing at a time everything gets done eventually. An update: I am nearly fully recovered. I finished PT on Wednesday, graduating to the gym where I will go in a bit. I am walking in the house without a cane. I do take it with me outside. Yesterday I planted a few flowers.

    Usually my mantras are what VS and Barb said: “I think I can” and “What was I thinking?” The song by Christine Lavin cracks me up.

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  7. Mom always said, ‘Oh well, it will be fine’. I say that a lot. Kelly hates it when I say that so at times she says it sarcastically back to me. We laugh.

    When feeling especially defeated I’ll say the Earth is going to fall into the sun anyway, so what’s the point.

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  8. “Accept what is. Let go of what was. Have faith in what will be.” A mindfulness mantra. But beyond the moment, the first part I do not accept.

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  10. Today at my knitting group the phrase was, “Hold your horses!” My impulse was to jump ahead of the planning stage for this coming fall’s sweater and straight into knitting it. I did get a little excited.

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  11. mom and apple pie

    VW van about a mile out to the road so that we could go downhill and pop the clutch after the battery had died to stay warm out in New Hampshire on Thanksgiving break. There were four of us and it was an uphill push for most of the mile and so we just kept chanting mom and apple pie mom, and
    apple pie and giving another shoulder on pie

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  14. I just clicked on the link VS provided in her post, The Chainsaw Massacre (from 2015) – there are some very funny stories in there, one by our departed Steve. And do NOT miss the DIY Disaster video posted by PJ.

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  15. Between 2000 and 2007 I commuted to work in Taiwan by bus and train. Sometimes my morning connection was rather tight. On such mornings, while passing through the train station, I would recite to myself, “If I miss this train, I can take the one that comes 20 minutes later.”
    Those words have served me well in subsequent years, although not where I reside now, in Michigan, where there’s only one train every day.

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