Little Garden Shed of Horror

My grandmother has a shed. She keeps garden supplies and tools inside of it. It's not very big at all-maybe 10 foot by 10 foot. When my grandfather was alive and still had chickens (only for the eggs-Grandpa was too much of a softie to use his birdies for meat), the shed was their house. As a small girl, I used to go and find the eggs from the chickens so that Grandma could wash them and put them in the fridge, and I used to go to the big container in the garage and get feed for the chickens.

However, that was then. This is now. Grandpa and the chickens are long gone. The shed is now a garden shed. And today, Grandma wanted the shed clean.

Now to me, a clean shed would have meant something along the lines of A) removing all the objects from the shed B) sweeping/vacuuming the floor C) putting the objects Grandma wants back into the shed D) shutting the door and forgetting about whatever you just did.

Grandma's idea was a lot different.

A) Remove objects (Okay, that one was obvious)

B) SCRUB THE CEMENT CLEAN! (My extremely sore muscles attest that I'm not kidding about this. For those of you who have never cleaned rough cement it is very, very hard to do, partially because this cement was probably never meant to be cleaned as it was the base of a chicken coop. It has never been sanded smooth, so it has a rough texture that grabs dirt. This might have been the first time in its life (15 plus years?) it had been cleaned. Once I had vacuumed up the loose dirt and scrubbed the surface with a brush to get the dirt UP out of the microscopic pits in the floor, I also had to take a rag to it to get the now loose dirt off the floor.)

C) Watch Grandma rip out the chicken wire that Grandpa had stapled over the lone light bulb, then take first a screwdriver to the wall to remove the holder for the wooden board holding the light, proceed onward with a saw and then when that didn't work, a knife/hammer combination to remove the board that the light was strung through. And then she restrung the light on its wires and put it back up on the wall.

My grandmother is 83 and could probably bite nails in half if she wanted to.

She scares me sometimes.

Continuing on:

D) Scrub out the old feed box (this meant removing the decade-old caked sawdust from the bottom. Fun!)

E) Grandma scrubbed the window in the back. I vacuumed and scrubbed the upper shelf (lady beetle hell), and also sucked up cobwebs.

Then once all that rigmarole was done, Grandma cleaned her garden tools (this I understood-dirt left on them over winter will make them rust) and we put the stuff back in the shed. We plunked bags of potting soil back onto the clean floor. If they leak, I am NOT going to be the one scrubbing up the dirt.

Job done, I go home, right?

Wrong.

Grandma had more for me to do today...namely, cleaning up those dead plants piled up in the garden weeks and weeks ago.

So, I grabbed a recently-polished pitchfork and piled slimy, moldy, rotten plants into the wheelbarrow so she could take them out and dump them in the copse in back of the garden. When they didn't come off the fork nicely, fingers were the only recourse.

(Does Mike Rowe need an assistant? Because those jobs he does can't be nearly as bad as handling a long wet rotten moldy gushy slimy tomato vine that really should have hit the compost heap a month ago.)

Grandma also wanted the vacuum cleaned out. Some of the lady beetles I'd sucked up before were still ALIVE in the machine. Grandma dumped the lot out in a piece of newspaper and stuffed the whole thing, living bugs and all, into the woodstove.

And then we went and got logs from the woodshed and put them in the wheelbarrow, wheeled them up to the steps and hauled all six of them down the stairs.

And we had to find a spot for the wheelbarrow in the garage. There wasn't one, so Grandma moved some stuff and I shoved the riding mower forward a few feet so the wheelbarrow could fit behind it. Then we shut that garage door and went to put all the stuff from the house we'd used (vacuum, brooms, brushes, rags, and some other things) away.

THEN we were done.

But only after I had pulled EVERY, SINGLE, muscle group in my body past its scream point. I haven't pushed myself that hard since I got the fibro, and the way I feel now would be why.

Recall, if you can, the first time you went skiing? Recall the day AFTER you hit the slopes when you felt like the slopes were hitting back?

That's sort of what it feels like (maybe times two?), save for the fact that I'll have the pain a couple of extra days because fibro makes muscles overly sensitive to strain and tension. When I overdo as I have, I may hurt for about 4 or 5 days. Worse if it rains or threatens to.

Bending at the waist is very painful right now, lifting my legs up and into the car was awful, and my upper neck and back feel like when I hit that kid on the sledding hill (dummy was walking up the down slope and I smoked him at about ten miles an hour on a plastic sled (going in the right direction for once and look where it got me.) He got blown one way and I got thrown in another. I had the wind knocked out of me and couldn't lift my arms above my head for a week.)

I'm on a lot of ibuprofen right now so that I can sleep tonight, otherwise I'll be spending my night shifting around in bed and raining down curses on my grandmother for making me SCRUB A GARDEN SHED'S CEMENT FLOOR.

Good thing I probably won't have to do it again. I'm making myself scarce next year when she starts mentioning cleaning the shed.

Ta,
Bec

Poem Time

An ode to the garbage eater in the house, Spirit the dog.

I'm a little Spritey
Short and fat
Can I have some food?
Are you gonna finish that?
When I hear food dropping
Hear it splat
There I am in seconds
To chew on that.

The way she's eating, we're not going to have enough food for the humans around here. Last week she was munching on eggshells. We know she doesn't have a calcium deficiency because she eats enough cheese for three people.

Whisper snarfed down my popcorn, but she's pretty picky about what she eats otherwise. She has her phobias (note: everything from rain to dark to cars to loud noises), but she's affectionate and sweet all the same.

Spirit, however, is jealous, conniving, sneaky, bratty, pushy, temperamental, sassy, and a glutton. She is also terribly cute and funny, which would be why she gets away with everything. Case in point: Poo's in a temper because she can't go out and play. Guess who's going to have to deal with that all day?

Not much going on with me. Waiting on everything...

Ta,
Bec

Roadkill Fishy

SO the dryer has been dead for about three weeks, despite all attempts to save it. Dad thinks the igniter is busted, which means it won't heat, which means that at the moment it's a very useless sort of appliance.

So Mom and I have been taking in the wet laundry (cause the washer's fine) and drying it at a laundromat in town. We also got groceries today when we did that because ten miles is a lot of distance to have to run back in to get stuff for supper.

So we did all we wanted to do and were headed home on the highway, when my mother suddenly shouts "Fish!" and slams on the brakes, sending the gallon of milk we'd just bought under the seat.

She claimed that she'd seen a fish lying on the side of the highway.

Me being me, I miss everything and I didn't see it. Mom believed (and was probably right) that I would continue to deny that there was anything there till the end of time if she didn't drive back across and back over to the place where she'd seen the fish and make me see it, too.

So she drove back around, as I tried to unwedge the gallon of milk from under the backside of the driver's seat.

And I saw the fish.

Dead.

On the side of the highway.

Mom assumed it was a perch or a small walleye.

Okay. So I believed her after I SAW the stupid thing lying there with its mouth open and everything.

How and why it was there was anyone's guess (Mom assumed the eagle that lives nearby may have picked it up from the river and then dropped it by accident.)

We considered going back again, picking it up, and cooking the thing for supper so that Dad could eat genuine piscine roadkill.

But we didn't. We had burgers instead. They were, at least, processed properly and the meat was somewhat cleaner than a fish with probable eagle talon marks and enough mercury to fill a thermometer in it (when they used to put mercury in them.)

It tops the list for weird roadkill I've seen. And I've seen plenty in my time.

I am fairly certain I won't be seeing a FISH on the side of the road again, especially not like that.

That is about it for me. Nothing else is happening.

Ta,
Bec

Discovering the Art of the Limerick

I clearly have a knack for limerick writing (this is the first one I've tried to write), but I need to practice. Take my poem about Jon Gosselin as an example.

There once was a man named Jon
8 kids later his morals are gone
He parties all the time
And perfects the art of whine
We wish he would go mow his lawn.

Ah, well. I can't be perfect at everything the first time around...most of the time I'm not. I'm surprised I could even produce a limerick of this quality straight off, without editing and without having ever done it before. I think I'm going to work on that for awhile, although 90% of the ones I've read are basically a sex joke.

Ta,
Bec