I think I've already established the fact that I'm fairly lazy.
It takes a lot of determination and interest to keep me going once I've begun a project, to the extent that I'm intensely proud whenever I manage to finish one. As has also been established, this is not a good thing.
One of the projects I'm most guilty of slacking on is housework. I enjoy doing the dishes (I know, weird, right?), and I don't mind the laundry, and I usually undergo a spate of "picking up" every few days, but other than that, it's a no-go. Hubs actually does more housework than I do (although I do all the cooking, which easily takes longer than almost anything he does around the house, but that's not the issue here).
I never really like this state of affairs, because while I don't mind a little clutter, or a little dirt, I hardly enjoy living in a sty. It's not a good thing when the dust bunnies on your living room floor resemble the tumbleweed in those Old West movies, both in size and quantity!
Well, this week I'm off from work, due to a fortuitous Labor Day and the need to use up all my vacation days before the fiscal year ends in October, so I figured I had no excuse. I would clean the gosh-darned house. And I did! I was very proud of myself. I dusted, swept all the floors, did the dishes and laundry (of course), cleaned the bathrooms, and even-- ye gods!-- mopped. That's some hard-core shit for me there.
I also tackled our over-grown garden.
When our house was placed in its current location, the ground had to be leveled, which revealed all the glorious red clay underneath the topsoil. The grass still hasn't come back all the way, and we really, really want it to, so we perhaps haven't been quite as timely in trimming the grass (and weeds, let's not kid ourselves) in the garden around our house. It had started to get really thick and tall, though, and I started getting worried that the nice lush thick undergrowth would both choke out our straggling Very Organically-Grown tomatoes and the few flowers the clay hasn't killed, and be a wonderful hiding ground for snakes.
Did I mention I'm terrified of snakes?
I live in the wrong area for my fear, snakes being rather common in rural areas and all. My mother-in-law keeps telling me all these wonderful stories about her sister finding a huge copperhead on her porch one morning, or warning us about the cottonmouth they saw at the creek the other day, or the rattlesnake the phone company men killed when they were setting up our phone line, oh my god. Believe it or not, though, I've lived here for almost three years and have only seen a couple of black ratsnakes, which don't really scare me as much as they're not poisonous.
But I digress. As usual. Anyway, Hubs and I decided to tackle our garden. I armed up with some work gloves and got to pulling the bigger of the weeds, he broke out the weed whacker and set to chiseling away at the aforementioned lush grass.
Around the halfway point, as Hubs was neatening up the very bushy area behind our air conditioning unit, the weed whacker decided to die and would not be resurrected without a new whacking cord. Since I'd been yanking weeds for an hour already and was pretty gung-ho by that point, I decided to just start yanking the grass up.
I yanked and yanked, reached out to grab a new handful...
...and jumped back with a shriek, as that particular handful had been about four inches from a coiled-up baby copperhead!
Given my fear of snakes, I feel I redeemed myself by not immediately hightailing it out of there and hiding under the covers until I knew it was gone, gone, gone. Instead I just turned very pale and stayed a decorous ten feet away. I even went back over to take another peek at it! I think Hubs was proud of me.
We weren't sure what to do about it, exactly, since we didn't really want to kill it, but it had to be dealt with, as our indoor/outdoor cat goes outside by herself and it would probably be best if she didn't have to deal with a known poisonous snake residing next to our house. We were actually surprised it was still there, since Hubs had been running that noisy weed whacker not a foot away from its head for a while, yet it hadn't budged.
So we decided, since the whacker was busted and all, to just go inside and wait until Hubs' dad got home from work so we could ask him how he dealt with the copperheads he finds. I made the cat come with us, which pissed her off, but I figure pissed-off cat >>>>> dead cat.
A few hours later, pissed-off cat <<<<< potential risk, so Hubs and I went outside, armed with a shovel and a rake, to see if we could flush it out.
IT WAS GONE.
We poked around in the remaining grass, making sure it hadn't just moved over a few inches, and even checked around both sides of the house, but Baby Copperhead had disappeared.
...Sad to say, that almost scares me worse than knowing exactly where it is. :-(
I think I will not be pulling weeds by hand for a little while.
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