Some people suffer in silence. Not me. I'm sore. I want the world to know.

Its been a little while since I last posted a blog. The reason is I have been on holidays. When I say holidays, I mean labour camp. I may or may not have mentioned my dislike for gardening. I may or may not have mentioned my barren wasteland of a backyard. I may or may not have mentioned DW's plans to transform our backyard to a something Jamie Durie might feel comfortable in (her metaphor, not mine). Anyway, we have been discussing how to approach this dilemna for some time and finally, I took a week and a half off work to give this whole garden makeover caper a bit of a try.

Now, I'm no Jamie Durie (so I am reminded) but I figured that I could wield a mattock as well as the next man, so long as he also worked in IT and hated gardening. A while back I bought a shiny new mattock with a bright yellow plastic handle and just to see how well it would work, I had a go at the backyard. We have clay in our backyard. Lots of clay. And we also get some pretty hot weather. So our clay has baked pretty hard. Anyway, when I swung my shiny new mattack with the bright yellow plastic handle down onto our sun-baked clay, expecting the sharp metal edge to disappear with a thud, I was a little disappointed. Firstly, the blade did not sink into the clay, but rather bounced and made a chinging sound like metal on concrete. A tiny powdery dint now marked the surface of the clay, the only evidence that anything had happened. Other than the fact that I was now dancing around the backyard shaking my hands vigorously because apparently the bright yellow plastic handle doesn't absorb ANY of the bone-jarring shock. DW popped her head out to ask what was happening. I told her it was likely to be a bit slow with just the mattock.

Anyway, last week, I decided that the only thing to do was hire some heavy machinery. We don't have access to our backyard from the rear so the heavy machinery would have to come in through the garage. I considered using a bobcat but I really wanted a rotary hoe. And I don't mean a hand-held rotary hoe, because I used one of those at the front of our house with DW's dad and it didn't work nearly as well as I hoped. So I opted for a Dingo with a rotary hoe attachment. In fact, I opted for the biggest, diesel-powered Dingo on the lot.

I have never used a Dingo before nor anything like it. There are twelve controls on the control panel and they are arranged to provide the experienced user with easy reach to everything, and to baffle the hell out of newbies. Fortunately for me, the hire place runs an introductory training course which runs from 9:30am to 9:31am with a 30 second break. Also, the drive home was fun because the family station wagon and a large, diesel-powered Dingo on a reinforced trailer weigh pretty much the same. The only advice given by my instructor and new-found mentor (we really bonded in the last 15 seconds) was to try a stay out of enclosed spaces and to start on something that didn't matter too much. And to buckle up on the way home.

So, I finally got home, white as a sheet, and drove the car into our backyard. Ten minutes later, I was zipping around the backyard like a mad man. Turns out the lever I used for forward was actually the throttle and what I thought was the throttle was actually to raise the bucket and the levers for steering are counter-intuitive and the best way to get somewhere was to try and drive away from it. Brakes weren't mentioned and they probably should have been. As it happens, I managed to get the hang of it before destroying the fence (only one pailing came off and I nailed it right back up, twice). A few minutes later I was zipping around the backyard, not like a madman (you could tell because I wasn't screaming and sweating like a fountain), but like a man with a purpose. And that purpose was to transform the backyard. I had a mission, and I chose to accept it and didn't self-destruct in five seconds. I plowed and hoed and dug and twisted and turned and sculpted and churned. It was like a ballet on ice, though instead of ice we had clay, and instead of ballerinas we had something more like a metal hippo with a flatulence problem. And of course, the Dingo.

Finally, it was done. I had done as much damage as one man can do in a miniature bulldozer. Even DW was impressed, noting my "on-the-fly" adapting of the plan as a stroke of adequacy with extra helpings of "it'll do" and a dash of "can't read a frikken plan". Anyway, with some creative genius, DW devised a new plan to make it all work and so I reluctantly drove the Dingo back to the yard and prepared myself for the following day of gardening/landscaping. At least I'd be in my element for part of the day, when I was building the garden beds. But that can wait until tomorrow.

Ciao!

Thought for the Day: Should people who don't live at the top floor of apartment blocks refer to God as "the man upstairs"?