Poison ivy
I'm having one of those "trapped inside with the baby" days. It's raining, raining, raining, which is good for the garden, but bad for my psyche. Normally on a day where I really have nothing to do but clean the house and take care of Daniel, I try and take a little walk around the neighborhood to 1) pretend I'm getting regular exercise and 2) prevent myself from going nuts. The rain, though, has pretty much done away with that idea.
The rain may also be doing away with the poison that Stu sprayed on the poison ivy a couple days ago. Remember how I had a conniption fit about the ^*%$ ChemLawn people coming to my door because I don't want their chemicals on my property? Well, my ideal of a pesticide-free lawn stops short of letting poison ivy grow willy-nilly. It's sprouting up in the front of the house and is practically carpeting the back of the backyard. If it were just me, I wouldn't worry about it, because I have yet to break out in a rash from poison ivy, despite having exposed myself to it many, many times. (Last summer I was pulling it up with my bare hands, thinking it was a regular weed, before I realized what it was.) But thinking ahead to when little Daniel is no longer a squirming, immobile infant but a mobile toddler motivated us to get rid of the poison ivy right now. So we broke down and bought some serious weed-killer with a sprayer. Oh, and we had to accessorize; by the time Stu was ready to go, he was decked out in thick latex gloves, safety goggles, and one of those face masks everyone in Hong Kong wore during the SARS scare. He's sure to set a trend.
I feel the same way about this poison ivy that Bush must feel about terrorists. I want to kill it wherever it's growing, and if some other plants are caught in the fray (or the spray!), that's just too bad. It comes up everywhere, running its insidious little vines all over any place with the littlest bit of shade. There are poison ivy "cells" growing under the porch, around the birch tree, and around the edges of the tarp and mulch I put down last year.
I feel the same way about poison ivy that I do about cockroaches: thou wilst be doneth away with my any means necessary. Our first apartment in Madison had a cockroach problem of epic proportions. At first, when I saw a roach, I would squeal, grab a tissue, squash it gingerly, and throw it in the toilet. Soon there were so many roaches that I only bothered killing the big ones, and I would do it with my bare fist, sweeping the carcass into the trash. I found a nest of cockroaches in an empty peanut butter jar. Once I found a litter of newly-hatched baby roaches posing as coffee grounds in the lid of the coffee grinder (fortunately, I realized what they were before brewing a cup). The worst incident, though, was when we were heating up leftover burritos in the microwave and saw a couple of roaches running around inside as if nothing was happening, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (or however you spell it). It was truly biblical.
The rain may also be doing away with the poison that Stu sprayed on the poison ivy a couple days ago. Remember how I had a conniption fit about the ^*%$ ChemLawn people coming to my door because I don't want their chemicals on my property? Well, my ideal of a pesticide-free lawn stops short of letting poison ivy grow willy-nilly. It's sprouting up in the front of the house and is practically carpeting the back of the backyard. If it were just me, I wouldn't worry about it, because I have yet to break out in a rash from poison ivy, despite having exposed myself to it many, many times. (Last summer I was pulling it up with my bare hands, thinking it was a regular weed, before I realized what it was.) But thinking ahead to when little Daniel is no longer a squirming, immobile infant but a mobile toddler motivated us to get rid of the poison ivy right now. So we broke down and bought some serious weed-killer with a sprayer. Oh, and we had to accessorize; by the time Stu was ready to go, he was decked out in thick latex gloves, safety goggles, and one of those face masks everyone in Hong Kong wore during the SARS scare. He's sure to set a trend.
I feel the same way about this poison ivy that Bush must feel about terrorists. I want to kill it wherever it's growing, and if some other plants are caught in the fray (or the spray!), that's just too bad. It comes up everywhere, running its insidious little vines all over any place with the littlest bit of shade. There are poison ivy "cells" growing under the porch, around the birch tree, and around the edges of the tarp and mulch I put down last year.
I feel the same way about poison ivy that I do about cockroaches: thou wilst be doneth away with my any means necessary. Our first apartment in Madison had a cockroach problem of epic proportions. At first, when I saw a roach, I would squeal, grab a tissue, squash it gingerly, and throw it in the toilet. Soon there were so many roaches that I only bothered killing the big ones, and I would do it with my bare fist, sweeping the carcass into the trash. I found a nest of cockroaches in an empty peanut butter jar. Once I found a litter of newly-hatched baby roaches posing as coffee grounds in the lid of the coffee grinder (fortunately, I realized what they were before brewing a cup). The worst incident, though, was when we were heating up leftover burritos in the microwave and saw a couple of roaches running around inside as if nothing was happening, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (or however you spell it). It was truly biblical.
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