Not Just for Prospectors Anymore

For the first time in my life I find myself shopping for a pickaxe (I actually edited a small portion of this wikipedia entry (my first time ever doing that) because the grammar was just awfuller than anything I have read in recent memory).

I have a lot of gardening (I don't like that word, old women garden). I have a lot of yardscaping to do, and once you get below the topsoil the ground becomes hard-as-concrete clay. Digging through that with a Walmart spade is a bone jarring exercise in futility.

I recently removed
several Helly, err, Holly bushes from around my front steps. Now, there are many varieties of Holly, some of them, like the actual trees, are nice, but mine were almost deadly. The spines on the tips of the leaves are sharper than any thorn. They easily went through my leather gloves. I had one of these spines go through my fingernail. THROUGH it. The actual fingernail. That hurt. Another spine went into a knuckle and the tip must have broken off under the skin. The knuckle was swollen and purple for a month.

Anyway, I was glad to finally have these bushes gone. But now I have to replace them. I've been to three different nurseries, but my head just spins at all the choices. I'm leaning toward some mixture of dwarf crape myrtles, hydrangeas and other assorted small flowering plants.

Holy crap. That's enough talk about flowers for one post. Drink beer! Woohoo!

Getting back to the pickaxe...

It's a really dangerous looking thing. What if somebody is dumb enough to sneak up behind you whilst swinging it?

Fiberglass handle or wood?

Definitely gotta make sure I get the 5 lb head.

And in other tangents, Lowe's's website has issues with Firefox. Idiots. I don't have an example for you, because now it is working, but I swear it wasn't a minute ago. Don't make me go back to Home Depot.