Attack of the Bumblebees

That whole weeding impulse that I mentioned before, has gone down quite a bit. Now it's more of a guilty murmur sort of thing. I am officially procrastinating on the whole gardening thing.

And I ROCK at procrastination!

I can doze in bed until noon and still not have begun to procrastinate. I'm also really good at digressing. You could ask me a question and I can talk for an hour without actually answering it. I would be great in politics, if not for the fact that I hate to wear pantihose.

Who invented those things, anyway? The pantihose, I mean. They're horrible. No matter how much you wear them, you never get used to having them on. At least I don't. I always walk away with slight claustrophobia and a new-found sympathy for sausages.

That was first class digression, right there.

This post is really about bumblebees. You didn't see that coming, did you? It really is too bad I don't like wearing pantihose. These days we have truckloads of bumblebees buzzing around in our garden. I use them as an excuse not to do too much gardening all at once. Cause dammit, these guys are HUGE! They're not guys at all, actually. They're queens. Hence the hugeness. They're flying around, looking for little holes in walls where they can set up shop. Apparently they like to live in holes in brick houses. They hibernate in the ground during the winter, and as soon as they're all warm and toast in springtime, they start looking for a place to live.

Earlier today, I was standing in the open veranda door, looking out at the garden while doing my usual procrastination routine, when a bumblebee the size of a bloody ping-pong ball came flying towards me. It was big enough for me to give it a good kick without having to do much aiming. It went "pfbzzzzzzz!" and decided to take it's royal business elsewhere. Which is a good thing, because I'm pretty sure it could have taken me in a fight...

Rubbing my spring in your wintery face!

I took this picture out in the garden a couple of weeks ago. There are flowery things doing their flowery business all over the place, while trees are turning green and birds are chirping. I’m sure if I could work out what that thing is that makes those birdies want to get up at 5am and sing, I could stick it in a pill and own most of the money in the universe.

Spring arrived here for real around the end of last month. If I’d known that Denmark was a near-tropical country, I would have moved here ages ago.

This has opened my eyes to the fact that I may quite possibly be evil. When I speak to family and friends back in the ol’ country, and they talk about it being cold and snowy still, I just can’t help rubbing it in their faces. I’m sure they all hate me by now. If they don’t, then I’m sure they want to.

Meet Mr. Green!

For those of you who have been paying attention, you might recall that last year I mentioned that my lawn mower was the devil. Whenever you turned it on, thick clouds of smoke would well from it, oil would spatter everywhere and it would make a sound like a hundred mice being slowly squeezed to death. For this reason, I was now ready to mow my lawn for the first time this season with a brand new, hopefully non-demonic, and very orange mower, which I decided to name Mr. Green.

So there I was, in the middle of my garden with Mr. Green, surrounded by far too tall grass. I pulled the starter-thingy and the engine roared to life. Or…well…“roared” might be an overstatement, it was more like an enthusiastic fart. Still, it was a nice change from the usual 20min battle it had been with the old devil spawn.

Thus far everything was terrific, but there was one itty, bitty little detail for which I was completely unprepared – the back wheels that moved all by themselves.

So the engine came to life with a loud fart and all of a sudden, Mr. Green blasted forwards, clumps of grass flying in all directions. I hung on for dear life, while the little voice in my head (Toots) yelled “GHOST! It’s a GHOST!”

Luckily the rational part of my brain, which is called Bergerac, decided to join us. “Perhaps you should let go of the handle,” it suggested. I did, and the mower's enraged attack of the garden seized immediately.

Now I have a freshly mowed lawn, although it is a bit funny looking, seeing how I haven’t quite worked out the aim just yet.


In further news, I had an exam on Friday. There are two things in this world that make me incredibly grumpy, if not straight out malevolent, and those two things are 1) gardening and 2) exams. This means that this past weekend I was so grouchy, I just wanted to rip someone’s head off and then make my way through town and beat people to death with it.

I didn’t, though… I wasn’t me, and you can’t prove it.