ambitious yard work

last night was much like any other night.

after our typical routine of playing with, feeding, and putting the twins to bed, the badger and i began to tackle our somewhat lengthy list of home improvement tasks.

most of the items on that list are centered around the exterior of our home.  in the three months since we have lived here, the ground has pretty much been covered in snow, which has allowed us to envision a yard much like eden itself  - overflowing with lush grasses, filled with fragrant blooms and speckled with trees as grand as the lord of hosts Herself. however, as the snow has now finally melted,  we have discovered the somewhat overwhelming clean-up project that lay before us, thus deducing that, quite frankly, the previous owners of our home simply did not give a sh*t. in fact, i think they took it upon themselves as a personal mission to make the yard as ghetto as possible.

our yard is quite expansive and will be lovely someday soon, but we have a great deal of raking, digging, burning, tilling, and re-seeding to do before that lovely day arrives. below is a non-exhaustive list of the items we have discovered in our yard and around the exterior of our house:

-        broken glass

-        beer cans and broken beer bottles

-        a poor little child’s test paper titled “grammar bytes!”; this poor little child scored a 9/20 (9 right, 11 wrong) on a “who’s versus whose” test.

-        candy bar wrappers

-        yogurt containers

-        pvc pipe

-        firework remnants

-        kids toys

-        a squishee ball (remember those?)

-        cat food

-        various knives that i can only assume were used to skin a fish or murder a house pet

oh, and add to that list approximately 4,792 black walnut shells, as we have a black walnut tree in our backyard. the tree is lovely, but has left it’s excrement (read: black walnuts) all over the yard for approximately 4 years with nary a hand to pick them up.

side note: if you need more squirrels in your yard, get a black walnut tree.

so, it’s a daunting task to say the least, this clean-up project on quincy street. but it’s ours, our very own, and we have been anxiously anticipating the Get-Started-Already moment.

which brings us to last night.

we were so excited, elated almost, to be outside doing yard and house work on our own home. the sunlight of a minnesota spring is truly lovely, and as i raked up the remnants of our yard’s somewhat ghetto past, there was a cool breeze drafting in from the west. the badger was busy working on the house itself, cleaning up telephone and old cable wires that are wrapped around our home like a python, most of them dead to any sort of service or electricity for years. as we cut, snipped and pulled, we discovered that our house is truly lovely when the ghosts of satellite-dish-paragon-cable-past finally relinquished their grip on our home. cutting wires will lead you all sorts of places – your basement, the crawl space, the deck, the porch, etc. it was a somewhat lengthy process. but all of those black wires and cables had met their match in the badger last night, as he set them free from the constraints of their past and piled them up into the garbage can.

we were feeling quite victorious.

until we sat down to watch tv.

… and then checked our internet connection.

… and realized that we may have gotten a bit overzealous with the whole cutting-of-the-wires-thing.

and so, the badger and I are somewhat “Off The Grid” until monday, which is the first available time that a technician can come out to our house for “this sort of undertaking” (yes, that is exactly what the comcast customer service rep referred to it as – an undertaking).

after all of that, what did we have for dinner? beer and cereal.