Lawn Labors Lightened
By More Power Musing
By Anthony Buccino
In spite of hoisting 1,000 pounds here
and 1,000 pounds there during the course of a recent homebound vacation,
the honey-do list barely seemed to shorten regardless of the number of things
I dutifully x-ed out with a thick marker.
The 1,000 pounds of top soil were lifted once into the back of the
minivan, then driven cross-town where they were lugged across the lawn and
slashed open in broad daylight and spread around the bushes just like in
the photos from those comfy home magazines.
Perhaps there is a special section in the back of those magazines
on how to fight off the creepy-crawly bugs, ants, pinchy bugs, spiders and
flying no-see-ums to thusly escape with all of one's own bodily fluids in
tact.
It's awful tacky to read those magazines all the way to the back
while standing at the supermarket checkout counter and never actually buy
it. But in the world of beautiful homes and well-trimmed gardens that is
the price we must not pay for keeping up with the Smiths next door.
The one way everyone seems to concur to solve every problem these
days is to "look it up on the Internet" where there are answers for
questions you haven't yet thought of asking. According to some recent
e-mail, there's an expert on everything somewhere on the net.
The task for the net minders is to click away forever through the
surf of get-rich offers, adult offers, lose-weight offers, Mega-mailer
offers, make-millions-with-your-own-web page and read-this-twice offers
all in the optimistic hope of drinking from the holy virtual grail of net
wisdom.
And somebody, not you, will make a lot of money, too.
But the law of weights and balances applies as equally on the net
as it does on the minivan – that is, if you try to put too much weight
in the back or download too much cyberstuff, you're going to crash.
That's why, besides not being Hercules, the bags of topsoil were
brought home in 10 40-pound bags and then 12 40-pound bags, and then four
more 40-pound bags.
Might I add that this was the only way to get the job done and
enjoy that homebound vacation with the dear ones during the hottest week
of the year.
Whenever I discover a great web site packed with terrific information
that I want to download or printout so I won't be on-line too long reading
it, all it takes is one click.
Then
my computer invariably goes into that red-light-on-and-humming mode that
I've been told means something is happening here, but I don't know what it
is, do I, Mr. Jones?
In the time it takes my 6-year-old computer to grunt and grumble
through its download, I could go out, buy a few bags of topsoil, bring
them home, spread them around, wash up and water the lawn, too.
That's when I find, upon returning to my Chisel-In-The-Stone brand
computer that some time – very shortly, in fact – after I left, it had
turned itself off.
In layman's terms, it looked at the bags of topsoil and said,
"Forget it."
Of course, my computer doesn't speak. I could only imagine what it
would say if it did, "Dust me! Oil me! Tickle my keys!" Perhaps.
But by turning
itself off when I ask it to look up something, it is telling me that I'm
trying to put a 4-by-8 foot sheet of plywood into the back of a Kia
Sportage.
No
matter how I try to bend the plywood, it still ain't going to fit.
A few years ago when this little computer problem surfaced the
expert guy at the computer store told me I needed more memory.
Of course, I told him my memory was fine, it was the computer that
wasn't working. Rim-shot.
He said something about where the ram roam and that there were
three ways to fix it. He said I could give him a lot of money and he could
give me some chips to improve my memory.
People get arrested and go to the prom with a guy named Bubba for
deals like that, so I asked about option two.
Plain and simple, he told me, my computer that I spent thousands
of bucks on and jammed with every programming doodad I could afford along
the line, my computer was incredibly outdated for today's work and the only
solution was to junk it. And give him a lot of money for a brand new
computer that would likely be outdated before I checked out at the register.
Now, a computer that has served me for years and withstood
lightning bolts, floods and still helped me write a book, is not something
that can be plucked like a dead azalea and tossed to the curb.
No, I could never let that happen to this great old computer.
As I cleared away the old growth bordering the flower beds, the computer
solution came to me like a jab in the eye with a sharp stick.
In fact, it
was a jab in the eye with a sharp stick but I avoided it in the blink of
an eye, so to speak.
Anyway, according to the garden philosopher, the answer
to more memory in my computer is to clear the old growth of programs and
files I haven't used since Florio was governor and that would give me room
to remember stuff while I save my pennies in that old canned soup jar.
Before you know it, I'll have enough memory to check out all those
great web sites and learn the secrets of a beautiful garden and how to
make millions e-mailing annoying notes to cyber-strangers.
Maybe I can earn enough millions to pay a landscaper and buy a new
computer. That could make the homebound vacation zip!
Copyright © 1997, 2003 by Anthony Buccino, All Rights
Reserved
This essay was adapted
from
RAMBLING ROUND
Inside and Outside at the Same Time
Handy book order form
Originally Published in Worrall
Community Newspapers. July 3, 1997
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