I hate wasting stuff

Ordinarily I love weed-whacking, but the temperature hasn't been below the 90s here for more than two months, so the weeds everywhere, and whatever grass peeks through the weeds, it's all knee-high.

I tried to deal with the weeds by siccing the donkey and the horse on them, but my equids were the opposite of help - they always find tiny patches of the grass they prefer and scalp those to the ground (essentially killing those patches of desirable grass) while stepping daintily around the switchgrass I wish they would eat.

Here's something else that's wasted - why did I bother putting up that deer fence to keep out the deer when my donkey does exactly what they did? He likes mulberry trees as much as the deer do - so the first time he got the chance he stripped all the bark off a 15-foot high tree I grew from a seedling. Now it's dead. Good work, Jethro.

Noticing the temperature was merely 91 late this afternoon I decided to weedwhack and that's when I uncovered so many wasted and broken things it put me in a horrible mood. What did I get for three hours of weedwhacking. Buckets of sweat, hundreds of chigger bites, and a survey of ruined purchases, abandoned projects, stupid mistakes...

For instance, traces of failed gardening. I put a lot of effort into building a lovely terraced garden. It gets plenty of sun, and it was fun dumping lots of donkey poop and composted chicken droppings and hay on it - but because I won't go out there in the blazing summer sun and weed, and because my chickens dig up every single thing I ever try to plant, and because we have a drought every summer, there will never be a garden...

There were broken sprinklers and rusty garden implements under those weeds, and dried-up skeletons of the blueberry bushes I kept planting for years. When the bushes got enough attention, the squirrels ate all the blueberries before they were ripe. When I was out of the state studying Yiddish in the hottest part of August, the bushes turned into black sticks. Never again.

And as long as I'm sulking about waste, back inside the house were the credit card bills I forgot to pay on time - no matter how many times I've requested those automatic email reminders, the companies don't send them. Why is it so hard to send an email? Once, I got a phone notification from a credit card company - AFTER the bill was due. If they'd made the call two days sooner, it would have saved me all those fines. Hmm, wonder why they waited...