Pender’s Fabulous Journal of Random Stuff and Things!!!!

Pulling up the weeds in my weed garden (leaving nothing but dirt) is rough. For some reason the entire front lawn is almost completely weeds (we bought the house like that not knowing what a pain in the ass it is to fix). Today I de-weeded it for 3 hours and I’m maybe 1/4 to 1/3 done. I need to look up proper de-weeding technique because I found that often the damned weeds would break away from their roots, which I know means that the stupid weed will grow back (which they learned from starfish, weeds of the sea). I did read that de-weeding after rain is a good time to do it because the ground isn’t as hard so the weeds don’t break off as much. Nice.

I know Halifax has some stupid rule about no pesticides or some bullshit like that so I started investigating some handy dandy tools (other than screwdriver) to help make the job easier. I found the following: Infra-Weeder Dandy-Destroyer That’s EXACTLY what I need, a propane powered weed burninator. That’s definitely going on the xmas wishlist. Nothing says lawncare like a tool that burns your weeds at 1000 degrees celcius.

I’ll outline my (lack of) technique and all you wonderful readers, both of ya, can give me pointers.
1. I have about a foot long screwdriver that I jam into the ground near the weed. Sometimes I put it in at an angle toward the weed and sometimes I just jam it straight down.
2. Start tugging at the weed then either start wiggling the screwdriver, or trying to leverage the weed up a bit with the screwdriver.
3. Pull until it either it comes out whole, partially or breaks off completely making me dig more with the screwdriver.

I have about a 10% success rate in pulling the entire damn weed up without it breaking off. Sometimes it breaks right at the joint between the greens and the root, which means I get to tug at the root some more and get maybe another 2 inches. Sometimes the screwdriver breaks the root I think and cuts it off at about the halfway point. So what’s the best way to do this?

The worst part about it is that when you’re de-weeding your garden it’s called “weeding the garden”.. Man that sucks.

Doing oil changes on my bike really sucks. I get oil everywhere then end up using a full roll of scott(tm) brand towels to clean it up. I also have to mop up all the old oil that ends up inside the damned plastics, which is real fun. What I don’t manage to clean out of the plastics seeps out of the crack between the plastics onto the garage floor, slowly. So that I clean it up then notice another puddle again 5 minutes later. What a freakin’ mess.

It took me almost a halfhour to get the damned oil filter off it, it was on there right good. There’s this bracket that goes onto the oil filter, I guess to prevent it from somehow coming loose and hitting a not so innocent bystander while I’m riding (which would end real soon after the oil filter flew off it). Well with the way the plastics are shaped and stuff it is a HUGE pain in the ass getting that stupid bracket on and off. I’m thinking next time I’ll just leave the bracket off. It’s not like the filter has any chance of possibly coming loose, I almost spin the bike with the force of me tightening it. Rawr!

Now I have a pan of oil I have to somehow dump into the 4L oil bottle I bought without spilling it all over the place. It shouldn’t be that bad, I ingeniously invented something I call a “funnel” out of something I call a “2L coke bottle”. I actually had to make that to even get all the oil out of my oil jug when I was filling the bike, the jug is huge (normally I get 4×1L things of oil, but this time they gave me one giant 4L jug) and I couldn’t put it upright enough to get about 200ml of oil out of it without spilling it all over the side of the bike, which I did.

What do I even do with the used oil anyhow? Do I have to pay someone to recycle it or somehow put it into hazardous disposal? How does that even work? Seems to me that shit could be cleaned up pretty easily and re-used.

It’s freezing out and has been raining all day so I get to test it tomorrow.