The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat
I played floor hockey again on Saturday, and my team actually WON this time! We had several different players than last week. These guys were actually good. They put a lot of offensive pressure on the opposing team, scored some goals early, and came back on defense and blocked a bunch of shots. It was a bit different in the second half, though. My team was tired and didn't come back on defense as much, so I faced a bunch of 3-on-2's, 2-on-1's, 2-on-none's, and even some 3-on-none's. I played pretty well, I think. Some of the goals that got by me I'd like to have back, but I made some pretty impressive saves, stopped a penalty shot, and we won 8-7 (that second half onslaught was tough). I always enjoy playing, but really enjoy it when I play well and when my team wins.
Didn't do much else this weekend except pick up 11 pounds of cherries from my back lawn! What a pain in the ass that was, especially right after hockey when my back was already sore. And 11 pounds! That's a lot of cherries. They're over-ripe so they've been falling off of our tree, and birds knock them down all the time. One fell down and hit me while I was picking them up, and one bird even pooped on me. By Sunday morning there was probably a new pound on the grass. But that didn't get to me so much. What got to me was the triple-threat of garden menaces: weeds, snails and ants.
My wife and I weeded on Sunday, for the first time in about two months. The weeds weren't really bad, but there were a lot, and they fucking hide under legitimate plants like motherfucking motherfuckers. No amount of profanity can be too much when describing weeds. They flourish like they're in a damn rain forest while our other plants either die or slouch like our house is in Death Valley. Morning Glory, which is vine-like, really sucks. It grows underneath one of your plants, and then twists its way around the stems of said desirable plant, so when you remove the weed, it takes half the plant with it. Some weeds even look like, and grow next to, other plants. So we don't even notice the weed is there until it's one a half times the height of the good plant.
While weeding I saw some snails, which I had hoped wouldn't be very bad this year. I am a naive man. We had run the sprinklers earlier in the morning, and when we went out there was still a lot of shade in the back yard, so the snails were out playing lawn darts, the bastards. We picked some off the lawn and laid down poison in their not-so- secret club house under the ground cover. While we were weeding in the flowers, we found a few more. And then, while lifting an abnormally floppy California Poppy to look for hidden weeds (in what had been previously the farthest point between the two known snail domains), we found a hoard of baby snails crawling around. They looked pretty cute, actually, but the thought of a Centralized Snail Breeding Colony made me shiver, so we picked up as many as we could see and pitched them into the weed bags to a blissful death surrounded by plenty of food. I spread some poison over the offending area, so hopefully we've regained that strategic territory.
Of course when you're weeding, you're bound to pull one that's conveniently situated right at the entrance to an ant hole, so when it pops out of the ground, a million ants also explode around your feet. My battle with ants is a near perfect analogy for the Bush Administration's war in Iraq and against terror. They invade your home and it pisses you off, so your knee-jerk reaction is to use excessive force against those responsible. So you hose them down with Raid and watch them twitch and die. Then you realize that they're out there, just waiting to invade you and destroy you, so you decide to fight them out there instead of at home. But when you get there, you realize that there are millions more out here and that it's too overwhelming. You put down ant dust on one area just to discover even more across the yard, or in the cracks in the driveway. You're never going to find them all, let alone beat them, but while you're out there blindly thrashing away, some more get into your house and swarm around a dropped piece of dog food on your kitchen floor. You've overextended your poison supply, let down you guard at the borders, and you've once again been victimized by the "freedom-hating" little fuckers (who aren't freedom hating at all, really, because they just want the freedom to live their lives on their turf, in a place they've lived since time immemorial before you tried to impose your imperialistic house and garden system on them).* The ants actually attacked my wife. She could feel them crawling on her, and something bit her on the back of the neck. (I feel them crawling over me as I write this!). That was the end for her, so she went in for a shower. I finished the last of the weeds, got bit on my leg by something, and hit the showers myself.
The only other thing of interest I did this weekend was see "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" with my wife. Despite the mediocre reviews by critics, we agreed with the other bloggers who liked the film and found it to be quite fun. It's more of a comedy than an action film, with beautiful people to look at, and you can't go wrong with Vince Vaughn for some laughs. I've never been that ga-ga over Angelina Jolie, but for me, she was more attractive in this movie than any other I've seen with her.
Oh yeah, I was also looking for some beautiful Vermont women. I found some more than I did in New Hampshire, but many had only face-shot pics or were from over the border in New York. Anyway, here they are!
* The entire Ant Allegory is satirical, and doesn't seek to make or endorse any actual points or arguments.
Didn't do much else this weekend except pick up 11 pounds of cherries from my back lawn! What a pain in the ass that was, especially right after hockey when my back was already sore. And 11 pounds! That's a lot of cherries. They're over-ripe so they've been falling off of our tree, and birds knock them down all the time. One fell down and hit me while I was picking them up, and one bird even pooped on me. By Sunday morning there was probably a new pound on the grass. But that didn't get to me so much. What got to me was the triple-threat of garden menaces: weeds, snails and ants.
My wife and I weeded on Sunday, for the first time in about two months. The weeds weren't really bad, but there were a lot, and they fucking hide under legitimate plants like motherfucking motherfuckers. No amount of profanity can be too much when describing weeds. They flourish like they're in a damn rain forest while our other plants either die or slouch like our house is in Death Valley. Morning Glory, which is vine-like, really sucks. It grows underneath one of your plants, and then twists its way around the stems of said desirable plant, so when you remove the weed, it takes half the plant with it. Some weeds even look like, and grow next to, other plants. So we don't even notice the weed is there until it's one a half times the height of the good plant.
While weeding I saw some snails, which I had hoped wouldn't be very bad this year. I am a naive man. We had run the sprinklers earlier in the morning, and when we went out there was still a lot of shade in the back yard, so the snails were out playing lawn darts, the bastards. We picked some off the lawn and laid down poison in their not-so- secret club house under the ground cover. While we were weeding in the flowers, we found a few more. And then, while lifting an abnormally floppy California Poppy to look for hidden weeds (in what had been previously the farthest point between the two known snail domains), we found a hoard of baby snails crawling around. They looked pretty cute, actually, but the thought of a Centralized Snail Breeding Colony made me shiver, so we picked up as many as we could see and pitched them into the weed bags to a blissful death surrounded by plenty of food. I spread some poison over the offending area, so hopefully we've regained that strategic territory.
Of course when you're weeding, you're bound to pull one that's conveniently situated right at the entrance to an ant hole, so when it pops out of the ground, a million ants also explode around your feet. My battle with ants is a near perfect analogy for the Bush Administration's war in Iraq and against terror. They invade your home and it pisses you off, so your knee-jerk reaction is to use excessive force against those responsible. So you hose them down with Raid and watch them twitch and die. Then you realize that they're out there, just waiting to invade you and destroy you, so you decide to fight them out there instead of at home. But when you get there, you realize that there are millions more out here and that it's too overwhelming. You put down ant dust on one area just to discover even more across the yard, or in the cracks in the driveway. You're never going to find them all, let alone beat them, but while you're out there blindly thrashing away, some more get into your house and swarm around a dropped piece of dog food on your kitchen floor. You've overextended your poison supply, let down you guard at the borders, and you've once again been victimized by the "freedom-hating" little fuckers (who aren't freedom hating at all, really, because they just want the freedom to live their lives on their turf, in a place they've lived since time immemorial before you tried to impose your imperialistic house and garden system on them).* The ants actually attacked my wife. She could feel them crawling on her, and something bit her on the back of the neck. (I feel them crawling over me as I write this!). That was the end for her, so she went in for a shower. I finished the last of the weeds, got bit on my leg by something, and hit the showers myself.
The only other thing of interest I did this weekend was see "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" with my wife. Despite the mediocre reviews by critics, we agreed with the other bloggers who liked the film and found it to be quite fun. It's more of a comedy than an action film, with beautiful people to look at, and you can't go wrong with Vince Vaughn for some laughs. I've never been that ga-ga over Angelina Jolie, but for me, she was more attractive in this movie than any other I've seen with her.
Oh yeah, I was also looking for some beautiful Vermont women. I found some more than I did in New Hampshire, but many had only face-shot pics or were from over the border in New York. Anyway, here they are!
* The entire Ant Allegory is satirical, and doesn't seek to make or endorse any actual points or arguments.
posted by CBK at
12:11 AM
