
On Friday I talked about a misadventure involving my loppers. In order to cut the trunks of that big ficus in the living room, I needed to go out to the garage and get my loppers–ordinary pruning shears weren’t going to get that job done.
So I went out to the garage and brought them in and realized that I had a problem the moment that I opened the handles and the blades didn’t move–that’s never a good situation.

A closer look immediately showed me what had happened: the handles and the blades were no longer attached because someone–not me, obviously because I spent the summer being very careful not to do anything that would disrupt the surgery to my eye and this clearly involved a lot of force–had forced these loppers to cut something well beyond their capacity. Very sad.
I know just the culprit too.
The Spoiler hires a series of folks to assist with yardwork. He’s definitely no longer capable of yardwork in any way. I have spent my last two summers out of commission healing from one surgery or other, so for all intents and purposes, neither have I been, for the most part.
But because of this–and because my complete inability to supervise at all this summer because the surgery was on my eye and I had to be face down for longer than I cared to–crazy things got done and in crazy ways as well.
And my tools either got broken, or in some instances, have completely disappeared–which, of course, I don’t discover until I need them.
It’s frustrating and at times expensive as well.
But the alternative is to live in an overgrown jungle–which isn’t an good alternative either. At least the Spoiler tried to help.
But as we all know, with things like gardening, “outsourcing” is rarely as good as doing it yourself.