Sore (Again).

Today I spent most of the day landscaping in the front yard (there was a brief respite to play tennis, wherein I received the biggest ass-whoppin' I have in years, but I was actually pretty happy about it because I actually played really well, but this isn't about tennis, so...). Who'd have thought that outlining a small garden area and tree with stones would be brutal, back-breaking work? I'll try to get some pictures when I get a chance.

The good news is that I got the stones for free. Perish the thought - those things cost about $3 a pop, so if I'd bought them from a store I'd have been out at least $100. Fortunately for me, a neighbor down the street has 4 palettes that were leftover from his construction that the builder was otherwise going to toss, so he's handing them out for free to whoever wants them. He's saving us big bucks!

An amusing side-note is I almost busted my ass rolling the stones to my house via said neighbor's wheel barrel, which had some sort of run-flat tire on it. The sod is still uneven in a lot of the yards around here. After I loaded the wheel barrel to the brim, I lifted, thinking "hey, I'm a pretty strong guy, any load is no big deal for me" and promptly began to fall over, until I summoned all my strength to avoid crashing down. Then the 100 meters to the house was a lot like the world's strongest man competitions where these guys pick up gigantic inanimate objects and carry them as far as they can before they drop them and collapse. As soon as I reached my front door, I was out of commission. Man, that was a heavy load.

Anyway, today I certainly learned why landscapers earn so much money. This stuff is tons of work and it's non-obvious how to do most of it. I needed to finish the "tree project" with some mulch, so I went to Lowe's to find it. Who knew how many differnet kinds of mulch you can buy?! "Yes, er, I'd like mulch. You know, the kind you put around trees." Pine, cedar? Color? Consistency?

Eh...I'll start clicking with this stuff eventually!