No, not that kind - you NSA types can go back to tracking down cyberterrorists and such.
What I mean is that I hack things. Like plant type things.
As in, I am a pruning idiot.
It's not as though I haven't tried. I own several books on gardening and have, indeed, opened all of them. I've even read a fair number of them. I've actually gone so far as to read up on the proper way to prune trees and shrubs.
It makes no sense to me!
I should mention here that, along with the "Hats I Wear" tab up there, I should also have one that says "Hats I Don't Wear" or even "Hat's I Can't Wear Because I'm A Stone Cold Idiot". Whenever one of my friends starts gushing at me over all the talents I have and all the things I can do, I politely remind them of the enormous laundry list of all the things I am completely inept at. (I suspect this is the German/Scots "don't blow your own horn" part of my upbringing.)
The thing is, when I'm bad at something, I tend simply not to do it. Or at least not to do it in public. This gives the impression that I am Pulled Together. Which is why I'm lucky almost no one in my local circle of friends reads this blog - my carefully crafted, I Know What I'm Doing cover would be completely blown.
Anyway, one of those things I stink at is learning anything manual out of a book. I can follow a knitting pattern if it is composed of stitches I already know, but I can only learn a new stitch if someone sits down next to me and demonstrates it step by step.
Maybe, if I could find some landscaping professional type person to spend an afternoon showing me what to cut and what not to, I would finally understand the basic rules of pruning. As it is, when the book says things like "Make additional corrective prunings to eliminate weak or narrow crotches and remove the less desirable central leader where double leaders occur."
What are they talking about?!!!!!
Besides sounding vaguely obscene, the above sentence is complete Greek to me.
So I'm stuck with hacking.
Another problem. Remember that little paint chipping OCD I told you about earlier? It tends to apply to shearing things as well.
I generally head out with the shears, intending to take a few minutes to trim some stuff back - a clip here and there - and the next thing you know I'm hacking off everything in sight. And, unless someone intervenes and takes those cross cut pruning shears (see, at least I know what to call them) away from my hacking little hands, my shrubbery will all be reduced to small clumps of sticks.
Unfortunately, unlike a bad haircut, it won't all grow back in 3 weeks.
Here's the handiwork for today:
Background: unhacked bush, Foreground: hacked bush
All my little "non-stump" bushes with the pile of clippings that came off of them.
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