Since I still get home with a headache 2-3 days a week, I’ve been keeping up a steady regimen of afternoon naps. As a result, I’ve started a bad habit of night-time gardening. See, my Realtor is throwing a housewarming party this Saturday, which has compounded my desire for everything to be exactly the way I want it. The most ambitious project I’ve taken up called for turning the portion of the backyard that’s directly behind the house and adjacent to the deck into a flowerbed. Flower garden? I’m not sure if the designation is determined by size or, if so, what the limit would be.

Even when I don’t feel like laying down for an hour as soon as I get home from work, I also don’t feel like going straight to Lowe’s while it’s still 90. Thus I’ve found myself at Lowe’s a couple of times a week somewhere between dusk and closing time, which remains a fairly narrow window this time of year. By the time I wander a few circuits around the store and get everything I need, it’s well and truly dark, but that hasn’t necessarily stopped me from spreading topsoil or planting a flower or two. Even when I’ve “planned ahead” the fact that I do everything slowly means it’s after 9:00 by the time I decide it’s too dark to accomplish much more.

After about a week on The Flowerbed Project all I need to do is spread mulch, drive rebar to attach the trellis to, and find a glider swing. And then put the glider together, I guess. Tonight upon return from Lowe’s I went to water the flowers and even in the dark noticed that a couple of them looked pretty sorry. I stooped to see why they weren’t doing as well as the other plants, and the problem was that their leaves HAD BEEN EATEN. Bastardos!

And that’s how, roughly a month after purchasing my first home, I turned into Elmer Fudd. Certainly this is one more tick each for the Dog and Fence columns, but sadly the former requires the latter and the latter is crazy expensive.