Actually, I should rephrase that headline: I am getting a machete.

I’m not particularly fond of doing any sort of yard work or landscaping.  The idea of having a nice-looking property is, nice, but I don’t particularly want to put forth the effort in doing it myself, and I don’t particularly want to pay what I feel is outlandish rates and be locked into contracts with a landscaping company to have someone else do it for me.  So it usually ends up with me doing the bare minimum to have a remotely passable yard, as in the grass remains cut, and the edges are barely maintained, but there’s not much in terms of fresh mulch, neat little accents or any of the small things that make yards look pretty.

But when things become what I think are necessity, then I guess I’ll go ahead and put a little more effort into things.  I have some shrubs that really need to be tamed, because I’ve literally watched squirrels use them as a springboard onto my physical home and for those that know me, I fucking hate squirrels, and the idea of them infiltrating my home now makes me feel homicidal, so I need to nip this in the butt before it becomes problematic.

Furthermore, my property is adjacent to county-owned land, so in some regards it’s nice to not have a neighbor on one side of my house, but in the other hand, the county doesn’t particularly do a good job of maintaining public land, so there’s a good bit of brush and wild growth that has encroached onto my property that needs to be tamed as well.

Needless to say, it’s more work than a trimmer and blower would be capable of doing, but I don’t want to spend the money to get some power tools for what is basically amounting to a single job.  Frankly, in my mind, a good afternoon with a machete is what I really need, so I went online and ordered, a machete.

It’ll be interesting when it gets here, because I’ve never actually used a machete for its intended purpose, and only known of them for fantastical scenarios of killing zombies.  In my mind, it’ll be a gratifying, satisfying and a stress-reliever of an activity, hacking away at wild plants and shrubs, while at the same time bringing order to my property and gaining land back from the county.

But I know there’s an equally strong chance that I am underestimating the whole task, and that ten minutes in, I’ll find that a machete isn’t that efficient, or that there are some plants that are far too thick for a machete to be of much use, and I’ll be exasperated and disappointed with the results, throw in the towel, and end up springing for some power tool(s), and just be behind on my anticipated timeline of getting this task done.

I won’t know until I try though. The machete is en route, and pretty soon we’ll see if it’s everything I hoped it would be, or if I’m going to regret making this decision, and be angsty about the time and money wasted.