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outdoor lawncare jihad
Tuesday, November 25 2025
Gretchen's parents would be arriving later this afternoon. Since they would be staying with us for several days, we needed to clean the house thoroughly, at least in the spaces they would be in. (Gretchen's mother in particular has a way of needling Gretchen amount the cleanliness of our house.) So Gretchen got our cleaner, Chaya, to come do her thing. She arrived at 9:00am, and soon thereafter Gretchen and Charlotte went on a long walk with our neighbor A. (Among the things they discussed was the series Devs that A starred in back in 2020.)
Meanwhile, I spent nearly the whole four hours that Chaya was here doing outdoor work. I started by processing more of the firewood that I had been processing, filling out the first (and only occupied) tranche of the woodshed and then starting a second one. (A full season of firewood uses about two tranches of wood, though much of the wood I was handling was too damp to be usable this season.)
At some point I took a break from the work near the woodshed and took the big Kobalt saw with the protruding law nmower battery to do some salvaging along the nearby Stick Trail closer than 300 feet from the house. I noticed a standing dead mid-sized sugar maple that looked like it could easily be felled, so I cut that down (it took only seconds to do so) and then bucked it into about a dozen rounds that, when split, were ready to burn. (I needed such wood, given the waterlogged nature of the wood I'd been processing.) The saw with that huge battery just kept having power, so I kept finding things to do with it, like cutting anther round out a big dead white ash that had fallen across the Chamomile a couple hundred feet upstream from the Stick Trail.
Though processing the firewood that had been in the yard was somewhat related to cleaning up the yard, what Gretchen really wanted me to do was pull up all the weeds and moth-eaten brassicas in the garden, cut back all the end-of season weeds (particularly the mugworts), trim the dead flower masses from the hydrangeas, and maybe even mow the lawn. So I did all those things, even using a step ladder to reach up as high into the hydrangeas as I could with my hedge trimmer (one of them is over twenty feet tall). When I mowed the grass, I realized it was the latest in the season that I had ever done so. Part of what happened was that the leaves strewn across the lawn were shredded into smaller pieces, and I also ran over several unseen dog turds, which clung to the wheels on the mower despite my efforts to get them off.
After all that yard work, I was thinking I would then have to do cleaning jihad in the basement, as that is not where Chaya typically cleans. But then I learned that Chaya had had her clean down there, and that meant that time I'd thought I'd be cleaning was now unspoken for. As I'm now a little obsessed with firewood gathering, went on several forays to retrieve that bone-dry sugar maple before the rains could come.
Our friend Ray showed up in the midst of all this and talked about the new manager that he hates at the restaurant where he works. He also showed me a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln that he'd animated with Meta-AI, a form of AI I've yet to have a use for.
Meanwhile Gretchen was making various things in the kitchen, and at some point she had me go pick up some kitchen mats she'd bought online at Kohl's, a store in Kingston that I'd never been in within a swath of ugly chain retail establishments south of ShopRite that I'd never had a reason to venture into. There's also a Texas Roadhouse, a Planet Fitness, and pickleball venue down there. When the woman scanned the barcode for Gretchen's order, she was presented with a list of potential orders and then for some reason asked me if the one I'd come from was for someone with the initials P.R. I said no, that it would be for someone with the initials G.P. The woman got confused and called over a manager and then it turned out that she didn't mean initials, she meant the first two letters of the last name, which really are P.R. The woman gave me a look like I was an idiot, but I can't be blamed for assuming she meant "initials" when she used the word "initials."
Gretchen's parents arrived a little later than expected, having gotten confused somehow at the roundabout at Exit 19 in Kingston. They were arriving just as Gretchen was about to head off to pilates, so after all the usual greeting rituals, she left, and I sat with her parents by the fire the whole time she was gone, talking about the recent cruise down the Rhine, their experience cruising that same route, and other relatively light topics.
When Gretchen came home, we dined on a noodlebake and a very good bean stew Gretchen had made (it was supposed to be a soup, but she'd added twice the beans that the recipe called for). Then as the evening wore on, I took my leave a few times to drink booze in the laboratory. I'd taken a recreational 120 mg dose of pseudoephedrine that seemed to be agreeing with me nicely and making me more social than I would normally be.
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