Mannish, Chapter 1

Let’s face it.  When it comes to doing manual labor type tasks, I’m somewhat of a little bitch. 

It’s true.  I’ll be the first to admit it.  I’ve always had these guy friends that just know stuff about typical guy things building stuff, fixing stuff, tools, landscaping, repairing cars, etc.  It amazes me how they know so much.  It also make me feel like an idiot and wonder why I don’t know all these things either.  Was there a “how to be a man’s man” class that everyone boy got to go to in elementary school but me?

If anything, you can’t lay this one on my dad.  He knows all about this stuff and gave me plenty of opportunity to learn it too, but I just never really invested in it.  Sure, I would help to do fix-it chores around the house when I was younger, but it was mostly me doing one specific task in a series of larger tasks: “Hold this here while I nail this in.”  “Okay.”  I never took the time to ask many questions about what we were doing or why we were doing it.  And if I did, I certainly don’t remember any of it now.

Flash forward to present day, and now I own a house with stuff in it that needs to be fixed from time to time and a yard that needs a lot of landscaping attention.  Sure, we moved in a year ago, but I’ve been able to avoid doing any serious maintenance or improvement work by hiding behind my consulting work all the time.  Nothing really serious got done unless Ashley did it or she yelled at me at least seven times to do it.  (The seventh time it seems to sink in for me, you know.)

Well I’m happy to report that all that is slowly changing, albeit slowly.  Since my “Jerry Maguire” moment a few months ago, I’ve slowly been re-introducing myself into the real world and taking an interest in things like sprucing up my house.  I figured that since this is a journey for me I’d chronicle my experiences gaining new manly knowledge here on the blizzog. 

The Planting Beds.

Since the house is new there’s really nothing to repair.  It’s the yard that’s busted right now.  We have an acre lot and almost 95% of it is grass.  The lot slopes downward to boot, so it takes a LONNNGGGG time to mow.  AG and I decided that our first priority would be to introduce a bunch of planting beds into the yard to cut down on the amount of grass we had to mow.

Great!  I was excited.  We were going to create some planting beds……now what?  Like any good computer dork faced with something he didn’t know how to do, I hit Google, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.  I got a book from Black & Decker called “The Complete Guide To Creative Landscapes” and another one from Better Homes and Gardens called the “New Complete Guide to Landscaping”.  The Black & Decker book taught me about all the things we needed to do to prepare the beds properly.  The Better Homes and Gardens book is teaching me all about the right kind of plants and stuff to grow once we have the beds prepared.

Using some advice from the first book, we got some rope and landscaping chalk a few weeks ago and cordoned off the areas of the yard that we wanted to turn into beds.  Next, we needed something to kill the grass so it wouldn’t grow back under the beds.  One of the benefits of being somewhat out in the country is quick access to a local feed & seed store and the knowledge of the local good ol’ boys that run the place.  I’m like a fish out of water every time I walk in there but they are always great to me and set me straight if I have any questions. 

The guy helping me a few weeks ago took me past the usual suspects like Round-Up and the Ortho stuff to another aisle in the back.  It was filled with creepy brownish bottles with labels on them that looked like they were printed up at Kinko’s and had names like Eraser and Kill-Zone.  I bought a non-descript bottle of something whose name I don’t remember after the guy held it up to me and said, “Now this stuff right here…it will kill you some shit.”

Who can argue with that?

So after killing me some shit a few weeks ago and mostly likely altering my DNA in the process, we let the beds rest so the volatile chemicals could dissapate.  We’re back at it this weekend.  I’ve rented a tiller and a landscaping trencher from today until Monday to help complete the task.  We’re going to till up the soil and mix in some soil conditioner, edge the beds with the trencher and then put pine straw over everything.  We’re going to wait and do most of our planting in the fall, but this gets the tough stuff out of the way for now.

All in all I must say that I’m pretty pleased with myself.  They dropped the tiller and trencher off this afternoon with absolutely no instructions.  Despite never using one before I figured out how to get it started and actually tilled a few beds this evening.  Though I’m living in mortal fear that I will be tilling my foot off sometime this weekend, I’m getting better with each bed I’m doing.  We’ll see how things go with the trencher too.  I may be a few years late to the party, but I’m glad that I’m taking the bull by the horns and learning how to do this stuff on my own.

Though this should go without saying for any of you that know us, don’t think that Ashley has been the poor helpless woman in all of this just waiting for me to take care of things.  AG has been instrumental in the planning and execution of this whole operation.  Truth be told, if Ashley was in charge we’d probably be done by now.  She would’ve just gone out and done it without any stinking books and we’d be going to the movies this weekend instead of tilling dirt.  But thankfully Ashley has been kind enough to indulge my Type-A need to get books about this and make sure that we are doing it absolutely the correct way, and I appreciate that.

So that’s the end of my first step towards being more mannish.  After we put the beds to bed – heh – my next project is to build some utility shelves in our garage to help get rid of all the clutter in there.  Stay tuned.