ritzy-schnitzy

Well, the Playboy of the Western World is IN!!!
My biker took him down today to pick out a place, and he decided on a one bedroom apartment on the fifth floor with a full kitchen.
This is SO VERY uncharacteristic...I fully expected him to choose some cheap ass little closet of a room facing an airshaft or something and instead he goes for the gusto! Right on!
I simply cannot describe the happiness and the relief I feel knowing that he will be taken care of in style for the remainder of his days, eating good food, having his cleaning taken care of, being chauffeured around town...
Oh, that reminds me.
We now own a rare edition Porsche, fully restored.
The Porsche belonged to the Playboy; it was his Tail Gunner for 20 years. As long as he's alive the biker plans to use it to usher him around in. That car is his pride and joy and just because he can't drive it any more doesn't mean that he can't ride around in it and profile.
Does this not rock? My family is safe and taken care of.
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Lately I have been making the commute every morning to the Stainless Steel Amazons' new place to babysit the Goonybird while she settles in. Poor kid; she has projects at work and finals at school, all in the same three-week timeframe that she had to move out of her old place on the hill. And that was a giant pain in the ass; dealing with Mr. Tiny Weenie the landlord and his wife Mrs. Suffering Martyr, who decided on the spur of the moment yesterday to fly up from California and show the place that evening. Gosh, thanks for the advance notice, bitch! Appreciate it all to hell! So we flew on over there yesterday, after she had pulled a full day of classes and work, and did a blitz clean on the motherfucker.
Guess who called an hour later drunk as a whore and changed her plans?
I hope someone flies her plane into a big steaming pile of SAVAGE REPUBLICANS.
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Whoever owned the property my daughter just moved into evidently never heard of them there newfangled inventions, the lawnmower and the weedwhacker. No wonder the deer thought it was Platos' Retreat; it was so overgrown they may as well have been in the middle of the wilderness. Fortunate for me, though. I love nothing better than taking a neglected patch of green and making it into a showplace. So while the Goonybird wanders around in the Goonybird-high grass watching ants I reclaim the place from the forest.
Fuckin you want to talk about blacberry vines.
Jesus Christ on a red bicycle.
The things are over the top of the house where it faces on the uphill slope. It's like unearthing Pompeii. I found the old deck; someone removed it from the house and hove it into the stickerbushes. Which grew up through it and nailed it securely to the ground. I found their blue coffee mug too. And 100$ worth of their old dead landscape plants that they neglected, and the spare bits of sheetrock from the remodel, and some pvc pipe, and...yeah. All covered by evil thorny wands six feet long and arched over higher than short little me can reach. What makes it really bad is that blackberry has a mounding habit; new canes loop up and then die back at first frost, then next years growth loops up over those dead canes, die back, and so on and so forth, year after year. So for every live cane I take out I remove twelve dead ones, thorns intact. What you end up doing is coring out the old stuff, chopping it up with a limbing shears and then hooking it out with a rake. That leaves a hollow igloo of new growth overhead. Then you lop those at ground level, hook a potato rake into the canes up overhead, and then pulling the whole mass inside out...hopefully making the wands flop away from you. Doesn't always work like that. I am well perforated this evening.
I spent some very unhappy childhood hours battling these evil things. In Oregon, Himalayan Blackberry is an uncontrollable monster, three times the pest it is here in Washington because the growing conditions are so ideal. Any cleared land that isn't kept clear comes overgrown with blackberry before the year is out. We used to take them out as a (resentful, uncooperative, drunken, bitching at the top of everyones lungs, crying, fighting, driving off in a huff) family effort and every year someone would get taken to the emergency room to have a finger or a toe reattached, an eye bandaged, or a gash sewn up. These things made you MAD after awhile. Pretty soon the whole bunch of us would be battling away grimly, slashing away for all we were worth. I remember my grandmother using her silver paper shears.
Back then you didn't cut them down and haul them off; that would spread them like a plague. The canes were cut down, chopped up with hatchets, meat cleavers, axes, rose shears, loppers, k-bars, butcher knives, whatever came to hand- and then gasoline poured over the whole plot and set alight. And that was just about enough to keep them down for ONE YEAR.
Ah, but now, now it is just me.
Me versus the blackberries.
I have time, and I have the drive. And this time they aren't EVER coming back. Know why?
I also have ROUNDUP.