At no point during the day do I ever say to my self, "Self, let's find new chores to do!"

There are already plenty of maintenance chores to do in my day. I wash the dishes. I brush my teeth. I randomly bark out nags to the child. These things take too much time already. Not a day goes by when I don't consider saving time by combining chores, like, for example, pissing into a catheter while making the bed. Obviously that combination was a joke (I never make the bed), but you get the idea. Too many chores.

Hank, on the other hand, is all about big projects. She's always thinking about plans for reorganizing the house, getting a new husband, or alchemy.

"So much lead!" she'll moan, and, suddenly she's drawing matter transmutation diagrams in bed. One day she'll invent husband alchemy and *poof* this blog will be replaced by a much better one.

Anyway, the other day she decided to look at our backyard. She saw this:
The vaguely trapezoidal area outlined in black is our backyard. You can see the dirt and construction trash on the top level, and then the rest of the stuff in upper 2/3rd of the outline is the lower part of our sloped backyard, affectionately known as "the jungle".

Shortly after we had our yard landscaped (about 5 years ago), I realized that I had more backyard than motivation. So, I concentrated on keeping the top level alive, and I left the bottom 2/3rds to die. Today, as you can see, either because I am incompetent, or because nature has a sense of humor, the top section is almost entirely dead, and the bottom part has flourished into a nearly impenetrable block of foliage.

Hank brought a landscape designer to the house a couple weeks ago and they examined the yard (from a distance, of course). The landscape designer determined that in addition to our yard being a visual blight, nearly every single plant in there produces pollen and is a contributor to the hay fever suffered by Hank and Daisy.

So, all but six of the plants must go. The idea is that we'll remove them, somehow, and replace them with plants that are non-allergen-producing and easily maintained. I'm thinking that that kind of magical bush is made of concrete, but I'm not a big fancy landscape designer, so Hank is ignoring my advice.

The to-be-removed plants vary in size. The smallest ones are about as big as me, and the biggest ones are the size of a small car. Somehow, they all need to disappear. Complicating this effort is the fact that we have no side access to our yard. All of these plants either have to go through our house, or we have to take advantage of our neighbor's access through their psychotically clean garage. Both of those options give me hives (as do several of the plants in our yard). So, we brought in a professional "hauler" to give us a quote on removing and hauling away the jungle. His estimate came to $1,100.

Those are U.S. dollars.

So, guess who is going to try and remove all those plants himself with his tiny little computer programmer arms? No, me! Then, instead of hauling them all away, I'm going to create a giant compost pile, which has already been given the moniker "mulch mountain".

This plan can't possibly fail.

Of course, I may need to start crapping while brushing my teeth to make the time for this effort, but if it'll save me $1,100, it's worth it.

Hilarity will ensue.