True Manhood

Julie is the Winston Churchill of home improvement speeches. One particular address, titled "Murder thy Branches of Tyranny," led to me balancing on the second-highest rung of an extension ladder while hand-sawing off a 10-inch diameter sunshine inhibitor.

I worried the branch might pendulum me off the ladder to my honorable death, so I tied the end of it to my neighbor's fence post.

See the strap there? It's ratcheted very tightly, so I imagined it would yank the severed branch away from me, probably with a poing sound, and I might live to see another day.

My dad used a similar technique while lying on his stomach in the living room and sawing an old rotten deck off the second story of his house. If that's evidence of true manhood, and I would argue that it is, then I still have a ways to go.

Here's a picture of me before I climbed higher. I'm submitting it to National Geographic with the caption "Dumb-ass in shorts."

Astonishingly, I cut the branch and didn't die. Then my neighbor Herb, who always kindly emails me when he sees a woodpecker on my house, brought over some kind of spray to, like, cauterize the tree's wound or something. Now Julie's garden will get more sun, and if I unwittingly killed the entire tree, then it will get way more sun.

Now, brimming with confidence and a new appreciation for life on the ground, I've embarked on the next project. This one was born of another of Julie's Churchillian orations about the state of the backyard, this time titled "Fortify Nature's Bounteous Bosom." She wants raised gardens for vegetables. The instructions are on a website called Pioneer Woman, an excellent resource for hardcore men like me.

So I went to Menard's and bought lumber. Apparently, what you're supposed to do is drive your pickup truck to the lumberyard in back and load 'er up. At least that's the impression I got when I pushed my shopping cart back there. Good times, good times.