I did it! I finished Bed No. 1 – well, it is as finished as I can do right now. Yes, I will have to add some more to it, but I don’t quite feel the urgency as much any more as I did before. It took quite a few bucket loads with the skidloader to get all the mulch put down, but a couple lows later – as there was a lot of shoveling and forking, and I was done.
Bob and I had gone to Farm & Fleet yesterday and as long as we were there, I wanted to pick up the obelisks that I had wanted for my birthday. No one got them for me, so as a little present to myself, I picked them up and an even greater gift was that they were also on sale. Yippee for me! Bob, on the other hand, did not find it amusing because we already had a cart full and I was able to get one on top of the cart – sort of looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it did the trick. That left him to carry the other one. Unfortunately for me and fortunately for him, that stopped me from doing any other shopping.
His frustration, however, did not stop there. Once we got to the car, we then had the daunting task of trying to put these towers of frustration into the car. By sizing them up, I knew they were too long to lie in the back seat. Bob didn’t think so (because women are usually wrong about things like that!!), but he quickly found out this time he was wrong. Then he tried to stick them in the trunk and the bases were too wide to go in that way. After a little constructive "criticism," I told him I thought I had it figured out, to which his words were – "you bought ‘em, you had better figure it out." My reply was simply action, not verbalization. I opened the back door on the driver’s side and put the back seats down, slid the "towers" in (we had already stacked one over the other) and, finally, they were in. All it took was just a little womanly coaxing and ingenuity.
He also had a couple choice words to say about the fact that I had picked up a couple pink flamingoes, but my old ones were faded and the sticks were too bent and it was time they hit the flamingo retirement home; so I had been in search of a new set of younger birds and I just happened to find them there. I told him, everyone knows, every garden has to have a set of pink flamingoes! It is just natural, common sense. I now had flamingoes to roost in my gardens again.
After we stopped to eat at the Draft House in Verona and shortly before we left, sister-in-law Faye and niece, Jessica, came in and we visited with them for a bit, and then we headed for home. Once unpacked, I wanted to hit the flower beds again.
Bed No. 1 needed its final weeding before I could do anything further. I grabbed my trusty little cooler with my gardening tools inside that I also use as my stool to sit on when I am weeding. I can only kneel for so long because of the screw I have in my right knee from my ACL/MCL surgery. It lays on the bottom of my knee when I am kneeling and hurts badly when knelt on, so a little stool does the trick. My cooler does double duty. I can also put my camera in there to take pictures when I want.
I was just about done with weeding around my tulips and some of the bare spots that I had left for some future plants to call home when Bob came back to see how I was doing. I actually had my back to him as he was first approaching but then had picked up the cooler to change to another spot when I spied him. He was trying to sneak up on me to scare me, but fortunately for me, he didn’t. So, as we were talking, I moved to a spot on south end of the bed and set the cooler down on a mound of mulch that I had placed earlier around one batch of tulips. I plunked my butt down and was intensely looking for the roots of some weeds when I put my head up to say something, straightened my back and then the dang-dest thing happened – I feel backwards and thought that would be it – just a little tumble backwards. But, no, I did a full tumble – ass over tea kettle. If I would have been graceful about it, it would have been a practiced tuck-and-roll. NOT!! This was a full backward head over heels topple that left me sprawled out on the grass, with dirt and red mulch stuck to my backside. I looked to Bob hoping that he would have a sympathetic look on his face, but I knew better. As he exploded into laughter, my first thoughts were that he was either going to have a heart attack from laughing so hard or pee his pants. (I was secretly hoping for peeing his pants but then I figured I would have to clean that up, too.) The first words were, "where was your camera when I needed it?" To which my reply, luckily, was that it was right next to him sitting on a lawn chair and fortunate for me he didn’t have it in his hands. His next words were, "it reminded me of a Weeble tumbling over." Hahaha!! Not funny!! Well, not comical as I toppled over; later on, I could laugh at it but I can quickly get over it. Bob, on the other hand, can’t. In fact, even today, Bob still bursts out in laughter and says, "I don’t know what I was thinking about needing a camera, because it is still stuck in my mind and I can’t stop laughing about it." Ugh!! I have to admit, though, that I bet it was quite a comical thing to see.
As he slunk away to start milking, giggling to himself like a little school girl, I finished up weeding and then headed to get the skidloader. Just as I was finishing up I was starting to go into a low and knew that it was supposed to rain that night or in the morning, so I wanted to finish things up. I got one more bucket full and grabbed the fork and started pushing mulch around until I was happy and just about ready to fall on the ground. I had just enough energy left in me to safely crawl back into the skidloader, put it away and still be able to walk to the house. Once I got my low under control, I went back out and pushed the mulch around a little more, and then set out my obelisk. The flamingoes also found a little spot to in which to roost.
Again, as with Bed No. 2, I am pretty satisfied with this bed. I can’t wait to see the blooms from all the plants in this large bed. Although, it is, as I said, quite large, it will be a nice break to the bean field once that matures behind it. Usually, there is corn that is planted in there, but this year it is beans so from the road that goes past the farm you might be able to see some of its glory once it, too, matures.
The only thing, hopefully, that you can’t see from the road, is a middle-aged Weeble tumbling over. Hmmmmm . . . what was that about Weebles – oh, yea, Weebles Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down.
I guess no one ever told them that once they get to be a certain age, their wobble and tumble turns into a very unbecoming tuck-and-roll.
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