Ow! My… Everything
For the last several months we’ve had something of a tradition of joining in our local Parkrun, and yesterday was no different. It’s good for me to do something physical on a regular basis, and it’s good for Duncan too. Last week Duncan absolutely destroyed his PB, so this week he took things a bit slow… but I didn’t really feel like it so I decided to have a crack and see what I was made of. I shaved about a minute off my PB, but more importantly I managed to avoid walking for almost the entirety of the first half, and a fair portion of the back half too, so I was pretty stoked.
I’m still slow as shit (36:11 for 5KM, or just under 12 minute miles on average, I think), and a far cry from the cardio fitness level I had in the early 2000s (when I went everywhere on a 20" BMX), but considering I run once a week and sit behind a desk the rest of the week I try not to beat myself up too much.
After that it was grocery shopping, and then time to come home. I needed to mow the lawn and wash the car, but fuck it that can wait. Duncan jumped onto Fortnite (a fairly rare occurrence lately!) because the new season just started, and then complained that he wanted the battle pass… unfortunately, he’s pretty broke at the moment, having recently spent almost all of his money, and the battle pass is close to $15AUD.
I don’t know if he expected his mom to just cave and buy it for him or what, but this went on for a bit before I jumped in… if he wants it so bad, we can go out and pull all the weeds out of the back driveway (which I’ve previously neglected) and I’ll pay him $15AUD for it. That sounds like a lot, writing it out, but while I didn’t take any before pictures I have to assure you it was an absolutely shit job filled with lots of manual labour, burrs/bindis, and other misery.
He declined, but after about 10 minutes acquiesced and decided he’d do it. Fuck, that means I have to actually do it instead of just not looking out the back window. Oh well, I’m sure we have a rental inspection coming up soon so it’d need done sooner or later, might as well be now.
We put on some old clothes and some gloves and got stuck into it, and I was right… it was a completely shit job. Various types of weeds were growing up through the gravel (absent any grass to compete with), and the gloves only partially protected against the burrs. We both came away with several pinhole wounds, the heat sucked (it wasn’t that hot, but was hot enough to be doing manual labour outside in!), and bending over to pull this shit out was even worse. Most of it came out without too much effort but some of it took me pulling while Duncan dug with a small shovel.
After about 45 minutes we got it done that I was satisfied the drive was weed free (there’s still a few small ones poking through, we’ll get those later), so I paid him his $15 and off he went.
But holy shit am I stiff and sore today, jesus christ…
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