The bearded eye-roller gets a little nervous every time I pull out the hedge trimmer or pruning sheers. In my hands, he considers these tools as weapons of mass destruction.

My dad always taught me to never be afraid of pruning too much. I know that you have to prune down the height of things if you want them to grow out wider, and vice-versa. I also know that if plants aren't given any light- they won't grow properly, so I keep most plants out of other plants way. The bearded eye-roller doesn't quite get this concept, but next year he'll see that all the ugliness I've created this year will turn out to be a good thing.

I hope so, anyway.

The hedges down our 200 foot driveway have been bugging the living daylights out of me since we've moved in, and of course, it's only gotten worse. So, last Sunday I spent SIX (yes, that's six) solid hours pruning and cleaning up those hedges.




I also re-'pommed' the trees.


Some of the hedges were about to the top of my head. By the time I finished they were all waist high. I decided that would be a good measurement so they'd all be about the same height. That's a lot of pruning and a LOT of cleaning up afterward. Suffice it to say, I was about dead by the 5.5 hour mark, and when the bearded eye-roller came out to see what I was up to, he kept his yapper shut when he saw this:


Instead of giving me lip for the bare branches showing in the hedges, he helped me finish cleaning up the yard. Awww, what a nice guy.

Yeah, I heard about it later when he knew I wasn't dying after all....

This Saturday, I spent another five hours in the yard. This isn't necessarily unusual, because I do tend to spend a lot of time weeding the gardens and dead-heading things. But there are areas of my yard, still left untouched (it's almost an acre, for Pete's sake- there's only so much time in a week). I decided to tackle one of those areas with the weed-wacker this weekend.

Two hours of weed-wacking. Do you know what that does to your arms? No? Well, let me tell you- by the time I was done, I went in to take a shower and wash my hair and I could barely lift my arms. Washing my hair was one of the funniest things I've ever done. Funny, because my arms kept flopping down. Seriously! They'd only stay up for so long to scrub my scalp, and they'd just flop down.

After my shower, I came downstairs and showed the bearded eye-roller my new 'trick'. I could walk around and my arms would swing wherever they wanted. I seemed to have no control over my arms, whatsoever. I couldn't even type on my laptop. Now, that's serious, folks. Not being able to type on my laptop could cause a major melt-down.

Today, even two days later, it's not so funny anymore. Yeouch- my arms feel like someone punched them, then ran over them with a truck, then twisted them, then put them on a stretching rack (no, wait- that would feel good about now...). Then started the process all over again about 100 times- except the stretching rack part.

You'd think I'd learn not to overextend myself, but if you've read my blog for any length of time- you'd know that this just isn't happening anytime soon.

I'm hoping that all that work will give me some really nice guns by the end of summer. So far, that's not the case- but a girl can hope.

More pictures of my yard for the month of August can be found on my flickr account.