Today, I spent a few hours raking leaves and dragging them to the curb so the city can ignore them and the leaves can blow down the street into someone else’s yard. Even with several hours spent on raking leaves, there are so many on the ground and still so many more to yet to fall, you can’t even really tell I did anything at all out there.
The big project was to get the leaves off the back porch. Every time I opened the back door this week to let the dogs in and out, giant piles of leaves would blow into the house. I took that as a sign that I needed to do something and hauled 5 trash cans full of leaves off the back porch today.
I worked some on the mountain of leaves in the back yard with the help of our youngest dog, who is also our largest dog. He is a beagle-dinosaur mix, huge and still growing. He helped me out a lot by carrying the rake away every time I would put it down to carry leaves to the curb. While I was raking, he would throw himself on top of the rake and chew at the handle. He also assisted by gnawing a couple tines off the rake while I was bagging up random bits of trash from around the back yard, and when I was done bagging trash, he helped me out by tearing the bag of trash to shreds and scattering it everywhere. He wanted to make the work more exciting, I guess; no sense in being bored out there!
After I’d had enough of the magic of leaf removal for one day, I thought I’d drag myself back in the house and watch cartoons. Given that I’d been in the areas of the yard frequented by our three dogs, it was important to inspect the bottoms of my shoes for anything fun that I shouldn’t track into the house. Inspection of the right foot was cool, but you know what? Thanks to the glory of my recently sprained ankle, I couldn’t tilt my left foot up to look at the bottom of my shoe! Too weak, won’t go that way at all. To think all this time I’ve taken for granted the ability to inspect my shoes for poop…ah, when I get that ability back, I’ll be ever so grateful. No worries, though; Minime was thrilled (and by thrilled, I mean horrified) to be asked to inspect my left shoe.
I’m sure there’s more fun to be had as the leaves continue to fall…but if I had any money to spare, I’d pay someone else to have all the fun of removing those leaves. That’s some fun I’m willing to pass up.