Garden Hazard

Erin, Ponyo and John

A happy picture of an adored pup. A face of calm puppyiness?

What this picture doesn't reveal is that the dog is a maniac.

This week I estimate he has eaten about $100 worth of camelias. They were the large camelias I bought to replace the small ones he ate earlier.

He has eaten a Japanese maple and has started on his second.

He ate a pistachio tree.

And the top out of the lilac tree.

The very expensive ground covering wattle has been reduced by half a couple of times now.

And he mowed down a magnolia tree.

This weekend I think it will be fence building time where a section of the yard will become his  own yard while we are out for the day. I simply can't afford his tastes!

Happiness is a new shelving unit

So I gave myself a super long weekend to rest my arm and it turns out I couldn't sit still that long......
On Tuesday I headed out to find a Chinese Tallow tree and came home with two shelving units.

Lovely Shelves and Lovely Little Jazz

Back at the old house there are still a few things I haven't moved across, primarily because there is no room. Now with these shelves I am hoping i have room for some more of the 'stuff'!

A month has passed

It is a month since the kids did the great job on the side garden.

Since then my arm has steadily got worse despite physio but it seems to have turned the corner now. Fingers crossed.
That's the short story: The long story is that I went to the doctor who asked me what hurt, what happened and could I lift my arms- no more than 5 minutes of his time. He sent me for an ultrasound then another doctor got the results and after 3 minutes of chatting, prescribed a steroid injection into my shoulder.
So in 8 minutes of consultation, I was sent off to do something I don't feel comfortable doing.

Meanwhile I took myself to a physio. Who spent 30 minutes or so working the various angles of freedom and restriction of movement then set to with massage, heat, buzzy thing and ultrasound. And follow up exercise. The progress then was great, not so great and now good. I have stopped the exercise and sought a work place assessment as I am positive that typing make it worse. I am not doing vacuuming or hanging up washing. 

Mum came and helped plant a pile of plants. She is impressive. I plant as many and have to spend an hour blogging to congratulate myself. She just thinks she should be cooking dinner because I have been at work!

The less I do the better my shoulder gets. But there is a limit to what I can ask the kids -and mum- to do, so yesterday I set out to mow the grass out the front.

My Mower, though I paid quite a lot less for mine.

I bought the mower on ebay: I should have realised that it wasn't going to be simple. 
No fuel: Of course and no can either.
No oil: again, naturally.
Two set of instructions: One for the engine and one to assemble everything else.
Assembly instructions are not for what I have in front of me and in broken English and some diagrams bad enough that I can't even tell what they are supposed to represent .
The seller has been helpful though so I have over the last two weekends got it sorted and I headed out yesterday to mow for the first time.

Not the lawn mind you, but the ragged nature strip. Probably called nature strip because all that is growing there is what Nature gave it. 

Looking down the hill at my first mowing: Not first ever for me, but first  for my new home.
And look at that sky? I love Canberra.

My mower is turbo-charged. When I hold an extra leaver, it engages and powers itself forward. I didn't realise that when I bought it and in the context of this buggered shoulder, it is a God-send.

Looking up the hill: See that building that looks like a McDonalds drive through? That is the monster that cost me so much angst with the mean builder.

The mower is HUGE. I think about 4 paces up and down my yard, and it will be done. In my head when I was buying it, I was resisting my compulsion to buy the smallest-cheapest. In retrospect though, with a buggered shoulder, tiny garden and limited storage, I really should have bought the little one. Never mind, I have a very manly lawn mower and I am sure I am impressing the neighbours with all my gardening antics.

As I began gardening, shifting so much soil, I imagined all the neighbouring gardeners (all men- I don't know what the ladies are doing) thinking, 'look at her go, who would have thought that chubby old thing would have that in her'.

When it was lawn time, 'She is a determined one, you got to wonder where she gets the guts to keep going'.

And out there with the lawn mower, I liked to think I became one of the boys.

I suspect instead what they have been thinking all along was, 'hope the weather holds, I might get to sit outside and have a beer when I am done'.

Like Dr Phil says, 'You wouldn't worry what people think about you if you knew how seldom they did it'.

Anyway, whether they know it or not, when I mowed the front lawn, I was feeling mighty proud because I have taken my garden from raw builders muck to mowable and that is a pretty cool thing.

The hay fever that followed was not so cool

ahhhh shooooooo