Digging In

For the last few years I have been steadily working on changing my black thumb into sometime more greenish. I have successfully grown tomatoes and strawberries in containers in my back yard for the last two summers, only killing the tomato plants well after they stopped fruiting. (The strawberry plants continue to live, even though they didn't produce much fruit last year.) So I decided that one of my projects for the blog should be gardening in a big way and I would go ahead and get a big raised bed built and started in the yard.

Day 1

Before I can build and plant the raised bed, I need to head to the local home improvement store. It is a non-preschool day for Agnes, but I think, surely this can be a trip that we could take together without too much fuss. Right?

We pull into the parking lot with Agnes loudly protesting from the back seat that she wants to go to the grocery store instead, since she is hungry. I finally convince her to pipe down and get on board with this trip and we can exit the car 5 minutes later. She is ecstatic to ride on the big lumber cart and defies injury switching from standing to sitting and moving between the 3 sections of the cart. I haven't the strength of will to fight that fight, and any injury sustained isn't likely to be critical, so I let it slide despite the glare of doom from another woman. I head for the lumber section.

It doesn't take me long to add six 8 foot boards and an 8 foot post to my cart, but it does make it pretty difficult to maneuver. Now, off to get bolts to put these babies together. Of course the home improvement store doesn't store them anywhere nearby, they are on the opposite side of the store near gardening. I push the now heavy cart across the store while admonishing Agnes to be careful and not put her feet down on the ground, lest I run them over to no avail. Once we get to the right section, I find the bolts easily. Which is a good thing because the kiddo is losing patience and has started shifting the loose inventory around.

Next up is the gardening section, where Agnes begs me to buy her a red shovel and I relent. I get myself and Agnes shovels, a ground breaker for myself, and start looking for landscaping flags to mark my sprinkler heads so they don't get torn up. I start to realize that I should have put the lumber in the cart last, it is so hard to maneuver in the gardening section of the store that I become more and more frustrated I can't find what I am looking for. I finally track down an employee who tells me that the flags I am looking for are with PVC piping, not in gardening. Of course, that is on the other side of the store, next to lumber.

Back through the store I push the heavy cart and the squirmy child. I grab the flags and head to the check out only to find myself positioned in the only open check out behind a guy filling out a credit application. Agnes is begging for candy, and I feel like I have entered some circle of hell. Another clerk comes by and tells me to go to the next lane, since she is opening. But by the time I maneuver the cart over there, I am third in line.

I finally get out of the store with both Agnes and I irritated and unhappy only to find that the only way the wood fits in the car is if I roll down a window and have the wood stick out a bit, so we can't go to the grocery store as planned. When I finally get home, I am relieved......until I realize that I didn't buy any clamps to hold the wood to my work table while cutting it, and my saw is not large enough to cut through the 4"x4" post. I toss the wood in the garage, close the door and wonder if this project is going to be more of a pain than it will be worth.