The right tool for the right job.

How did you spend your Thanksgiving weekend? I spent very little time on my bike, which was bad, but I did get a lot of work done. As you know from past post, we hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our house (21 people), then two days later through my wife's parents a surprise anniversary party (45 people). We also managed to get the house decorated for the Christmas season, and I trimmed the hedges in my back yard. Those are the things I want to talk about.

On Friday I decided I needed to trim the hedges in my back yard. I consistently trimmed them through the summer to keep them from creeping into the yard to much, but I ignored the height. These things were like 20 feet tall and they should have been 8 feet max. So I got out my plug in hedger and went to town. That didn't last long when I realized I had the wrong tool. It just wasn't cutting it (literally). So I did what anyone would do, I gave up.

In place of cutting the hedges I decided to put up Christmas lights. This year I was going to run them all along the roof line. Which meant I needed to pull out my tall ladder. This ladder was one that came with the house and I had never used it. So I pulled it out and realized it didn't even have a haylard. I am so use to fire service ladders that these little commercial ones make me a little nervous. So I extended it by hand and laid it place. About half way up it was flexing so bad that I thought I was going through the window. So I climb down and through the ladder away. Wrong tool.

I finally used my little giant ladder, that although it wasn't quite tall enough, I felt better on that then I did off that other one. So my lights got put up, and I only had to exchange one strand after I had put them up because they suddenly stopped working.


I then called my friend and teammate Tim to get advice about landscaping. He works with Jon at Outdoor Impressions, a fine landscaping service (yes that was a cheap plug, I'll give you their phone number if you want it). He offered to lend me his hedger and razor saw to get the job done. I came home from church today and they were on my porch. A Stihl hedger, it doesn't get any better than that.


So I took this kick ass Stihl (another cheap plug) hedger out and trimmed through those hedges like nothing. I used the razor saw for those branches that were really thick. The hardest part was cleaning the debris afterwards.

Well by the end of the weekend I rode 3 fewer days than I had hoped to but I got a lot of much needed work done. Sorry for missing the ride Kevin. I was trimming bush when I lost track of time and decided to just keep going.

Now its back to work. See some of you at Velocity. Time to work off those turkeys.