Welcome to the jungle

Since I've been out of town for nearly a month and it's rained almost everyday in June and July so far, my back yard had turned into a jungle. The front had been cut once or twice but never seems to get that unruly.

When I walked outside between thunderstorms, I noticed that the grass was three feet tall in places. Shit!

I always do the yard work after 7PM, because having the sun overhead just makes the job that much more miserable.

I pulled my oldest from his video game, handed him a weed eater, while I fired up the trusty lawnmower. My son was not pleased with me for interrupting his game but the sadistic side of me figured he needed to be outside suffering with good ole dad.

The mower kept bogging down, getting clogged and I had to restart it for every three feet of grass cut.

As soon as I heard the engine start to sputter I would push down on the handle to get it out of the grass, this only worked half the time. I made up some new cuss words or at least some new combinations of existing ones.

To make matters worse, one of my darling daughters had put a wads of used chewing gum in my shoes. As my feet began to heat up and perspire, the gum fused my socks to my shoes. I never realized how distracting and uncomfortable it is not to have your socks and shoes independent of each other. This obviously didn't improve my mood.

My son was carving out scalloped grass holes in a very unenthusiastic, half assed manner and used any excuse to wander off or stop working. I practically had to tape him to his garden implement, because every time a grasshopper or some other bug jumped on him he would drop the weed whacker and run away in terror.

It was kind of embarrassing, I didn't know if his bug fear was real, an excuse to not do work or just to piss me off. Exasperated, I sent him inside to take a shower and go to bed. My wife sent him back out with a promise to straighten up and start pulling his weight.

I started to make headway and was able to get the job finished in about two hours. Normally it takes about 25 min when the grass is of normal height.

Even though it was late in the evening, I was soaked with sweat and covered with chunks of grass and grasshopper guts.

By the time I got everything wrapped up and put away, I went inside to take a shower and found that the kids had all the bathrooms occupied taking their own baths and showers.

Drenched with sweat, filthy and smelly, I was tempted to go lay down in their beds to get them back for the gum incident, but I figured it would just be more work for me in the long run.

So I just toweled off and put on some dry clothes while waiting patiently for a bathroom to become available. The hardest part was getting my feet out of my shoes. Basically, the bottoms of my socks just ripped off and remained securely glued to the insoles.

That topped off the evening nicely.

Now I know why Singapore has banned chewing gum.