My Weeding Project This Morning – It Took Me at Least 30 Minutes – Steve Is Back to Work Like He Never Had a Hip Replacement Operation – He Worries Me – Cactus Removal Project to Come – I Say Make Cactus Salad with an Ax – Put it in the Garbage Disposal – Steve Says It Won’t Work –

Imagine this cactus with creepy-crawly weeds embedded all around it. I scraped them into a brown and green substance using my garden tool shaped like Captain Hook’s claw. With my gloved hand I picked out the green pieces. The same repulsive weeds ran through the stones surrounding the cactus. I clawed the weeds and the stones together, and picked out the green stuff and tossed it in the trash. What a mess that was! I had to put the stones back into a circle around the cactus.

Thirty minutes weeding is my limit until muscles begin to form in my legs. I was an office person all my working days, which did not require leg muscles. Could they have atrophied? Once I get down on the ground, I roll around until I figure out how to get up. Within a few weeks, I will have that down pat. Last year, I almost accomplished it, but not quite. If I am exaggerating, it’s only a little. There is hope. There is always hope.

If I didn’t know Steve had a hip replacement operation six weeks ago, I wouldn’t believe it. He struts around the grocery store like a rooster patrolling the hen house. I can’t keep up with him. Here he is weeding the garden like it’s nothing. He can’t wait to get back to work on his flooring project. Eight-hour working days are his idea of fun.

Look at that cactus! It stretches halfway across the yard and its diameter is twenty inches in its fattest part. I suggested that we cut it up into salad and put it in the garbage disposal. Steve said it would take two days and three garbage disposals and wouldn’t work. He is right. We have to get it out to the curb for trash pickup somehow.