So Saturday verged on a waking nightmare for me. It all started out innocently enough – D woke up around 7 so I got up and took care of her while R slept in. After a little breakfast I gave her a bath, and it was the first time I cracked out a bag of bath toys. Oh my lord was she in heaven! I’d gotten them out a few days prior for her to play with while sitting in her bathtub dry as I got ready in the bathroom, but she hadn’t had them in the water yet. It was a whole assortment of sea creature squirties, and she had a ball.
After her bath it was nap time, which was my cue to go run errands. Saturday was my mulch day, since it was the first semi-nice day in forever and the forecast after that appeared to be crap (turns out they were wrong – shocker! – but i wasn’t taking any chances and wanted to get this stuff in). Last year it did a fantastic job preventing weeds, which was another reason why I wanted to get it in before those little fuckers took over the gardens (i get the Preen kind with fertilizer in it. i’m sure it’s not the most eco-friendly, but extremely SM-friendly since i don’t have to spend hours all summer pulling weeds, which i loathe). So off I headed to Stein to load up on this season’s mulch.
Now here’s where the fun really began. We have two vehicles – a Toyota Highlander and a big Chevy pickup truck. Which would be better for hauling mulch? The truck with it’s big open bed, perfect for dirty jobs, duh. Which did I take? The Highlander with it’s much smaller fabric-covered cargo area, good for groceries and luggage but horrible for dirty jobs, duh. I must admit it did occur to me, albeit very fleetingly, to take the truck since I knew it would be infinitely better to use for such a trip. But I paid that thought no attention, unfortunately, and took the other one since I hate driving the truck and figured I was just “running errands” anyway.
BIG mistake. 12 30-lb. bags of rain-soaked mulch later, and the back of the Highlander was a wet, brown, mulchy disaster. And not just brown because it was mulch and hence full of dirt. I mean brown because it was colored chestnut brown. Hooray. Sure I had sheet upon sheet of Stein’s complimentary plastic down and over it all to try and spare the car, but I may as well have been lining it with tissue paper for all the good it did. Why I thought this was going to be easy, I have no idea. Not only was the shit heavy as hell (especially since my plan to get back into shape and regain a modicum of muscle strength has continuously failed so far), but I was not dressed to ruin my clothes so was trying very hard not to smear this crap along my jeans and jacket as I flung the bags around or stand in the river of brown dye that was pouring out the back of the car as it got increasingly weighed down with each bag. I’m sure I looked like a complete idiot – first I had to lug these dozen bags down off the pile in the store’s outdoor yard and onto my orange wheeled cart while trying to figure out what to do with my purse without ruining it, then I had to use all my strength to haul the cart up to the checkout window, then I had to return to said window twice to get more plastic sheets since it was so much messier than I expected, then I spent who knows how long trying to lift each bag back up off the cart and place it in the back of the car so that it didn’t splatter mulchy crap water too far up the sides and backs of the seats in the middle row. Ugh. SO not happy driving home, just knowing the monster clean-up job that awaited me upon removal of all 360 lbs. of mulch when I dumped the bags into the driveway.
Once I had all the mulch unloaded and the mat from the cargo area laid out to be scrubbed and dried in the sun that was still shining at that point, I went inside to see how D had been for Daddy. Guess what awaited me in there? Another mess, yippee! R has begun his latest hobby of charcuterie, and this was his weekend to try his hand at homemade sausages and bacon. I have sung his praises over and over for being such a great cook, but bless his heart, he is not the best cleaner-upper. Especially when it comes to raw meat, I don’t take any chances. I like knowing that everything has been thoroughly cleaned and sanitized so as not to leave any salmonella or e. coli running around the kitchen, where D loves to scoot around and put everything she can find into her mouth. So I fed D some lunch (not fun since she was being a pill and was cranky all weekend, which added to my mess-induced anxiety) while (not-so-)patiently waiting for him to stuff the last casing and take everything down to the big freezer, then proceeded to scrub down the counters, sink, faucet, and floor to remove every last bit of raw sausage and grease that I could find.
Ok, now at least a good hour later and D down for another nap, back out to my mulch. I got the floor mat scrubbed with soap and thoroughly rinsed, but you could totally still see where the brown puddles had been. Great. Too bad, that was just going to have to wait until Sunday to be rewashed. I had more pressing issues, like actually getting all this mulch into the gardens before the threatening rain clouds that had now blanketed the area unleashed their fury on me. 2 hours, 4 gardens, 12 empty mulch bags, and one very tired back later, I was done! And I think they turned out pretty well, ifidosaysomyself.
And just in case you’re interested, here’s what R was working on to create the mess mentioned above:
I really hate messes, but I always do feel great once they’re cleaned up and the world is right again. On Sunday I mopped the living room, dining room, and kitchen floors, then went outside to mow and rake the lawns and admire my mulch. 🙂
