Of Weeds and Hips

There has been no weaving or weaving-related activities taking place, due to my self-inflicted hip problem earlier, and the arrival of the brisk season plus a new toy called the Green Bin. This is another random, meandering post. (In great details, nevertheless; goodness, I'm long-winded!)

 

The days are finally cooling down, and I am in my element weeding for a few hours in the afternoons, and doing light-hearted things in the hours after dinner watching and not watching whatever is streaming on the computer. Oh, I love the cooler season! The next couple of months are my favorite time of the year. 

 

Autumn arrived very late this year, and this might be just a cold spell and we may return to the lukewarm temperatures again. The big maple still has 20-25% of the leaves and cherry hasn't started falling yet. The hills in the distance had its first snowfall just this week. 

This is what is known as the Green Bin; we opted for the 240L rather than 120L; and we can throw in most garden waste up to 70kg, (no soil, no flax leaves,) haul it up the steep driveway to the main road, and the rubbish will be taken away every other Monday for only $5.35/fortnight. I may have been aware of this service, I can't remember, but Esther recommended and we slow-jumped on the idea. Weeding constantly, steadily, incrementally, and have it taken away regularly suits the chances in my old body/head/stamina, rather than ordering a huge skip once a year and having to load it up within the week. (For that, we save a year's worth of garden rubbish in about a dozen wool bags, and some compost. One year we had too much and picked out bad roots, bulbs, and vines, bag by bag, but most years we just chuck them all out.) 

 

When it arrived, at 7.07AM a week ago Friday, the 240L bin looked bottomless, but this week, after a fortnight of rain, I weeded for eight hours over two afternoons, and filled 2/3 of the bin with very wet weeds, which is about the maximum weight Ben can manage up the driveway. I'm a little disappointed because I was hoping for... maybe twice as much at least. While discussing the size of the bin to order, size-wise, Ben imagined we could load it up on the back of the Pajero, but it's too wide to fit and too heavy to lift. We haven't experimented with dragging it up the driveway, yet. :-D At roughly $5.35/fortnight, it's still a great incentive for me to get outside on a regular basis. And maybe it's a good thing it doesn't require 80 hours to fill the whole thing. And the rest will go into the wool bags to supplement the bin in weeks we don't have enough, or to let compost and to deal with maybe this summer.

It's crushing to contemplate the magnitude of our mess, though sadly this is nothing new, us being the great indoors people. But once I'm outside, I am able to concentrate on the weed in front of me most of the time, and the brisk air and birds lift my spirits. When someone else's power tools come out, I just raise the volume of my audiobook. There is one tui that has been around for months now, and doesn't seem to be too afraid of us. Sadly the kowhai doesn't have a lot of flowers this year, again, so I hope he gets to have the tree to himself. 

Oh, the self-inflicted hip problem. One Monday I woke up and I had sharp pains on my right hip and I couldn't put any weight on it. I didn't recall sleeping in a weird position, I didn't fall off the bed, I wasn't sure how I got it. By Tuesday afternoon, I realized I am fine standing up, and it suddenly dawned on my I had the same problem some years ago, caused by my not sitting straight. Because I'm so short there's been only one chair in my life I could sit on comfortably. (Well, actually, a few, they being my parents' dining set, with one remaining in Mom's apartment until the last days in 2019. If it could have been taken apart, I would have brought it home; I even contemplated sawing a few places; and it wasn't ugly!) You can imagine in New Zealand my problem is worse. I find myself sitting with my weight on one side or another, and it's worse when I sit on the floor, which I do often because chairs are so uncomfortable, but I prop up the same side, (it must be the left?) with a cushion for some reason.

Last time it took months to remedy, ending up in the purchase of a nice-looking but not exactly comfortable rocker/recliner, but this time I stayed standing up most of the day for a few days, (and boy, I got a lot of cooking done, all the ironing, and even some print work!) and the pain went away by the end of the week. I'm dying to go downstairs to keep threading the tied-weave, but that's very problematic as I sit on a tiny folding camping/fishing thing, and even at normal times I have to quit after a couple of hours because my lower limbs go all funny. I am now considering different ways of sitting on the floor, or a stack of books, for that.

Meanwhile, this hay-fever-related problem isn't going away, and we look set for a very warm winter, so... life is never boring.