Love Hate Relationships...

There are many things that people have love hate relationships with. I do too. One of the things that really frustrates me is yard work. For some people it's relaxing and something to do to get away from stress, etc. For me it is stressful. The actual work and keeping up of a yard is extremely stressful and frustrating. The only time it's calming and relaxing to me is when all the work (or most of it) is done and you see the outcome. But even then you have to get ready to start all over again of maintaining what you already did.
No matter how hard we try, we can't get certain spots in our backyard to grow. It's irritating. Then other spots grow jungle grass or something that we can't keep cut enough. Then we have stupid tree sprouts that pop up everywhere, and you have to be hercules or something to get them pulled or cut out of the ground and inevitably they will come back again someday. Then we have the neighbors that don't clean up those saplings that grow just outside of our fence but dangle in our yard and look like garbage.
Then we have a permenant path in our front yard where everyone decides it's more convenient to walk then to come up the stairs by the driveway, so our grass is dying there. I tell people to please not walk there as you can plainly see it's killing the grass.
But right now my biggest complaint is our evergreen hedges that line our driveway. The annoy me to no end. Tony likes them, I would LOVE to pull them out and put something nicer and easier to take care of there, but I'm not willing to fight about it. However, he loves them but doesn't ever trim them or clean leaves out of them, etc. They collect garbage from the neighborhood when it's windy, they collect all the leaves of the year and that makes it a good home for garder snakes and spiders, which are in abundance, and ants! So yesterday I got out my electric hedge clippers and hacked away. I cut them into seperate bushes, because they had long since grown together, and I cut them down to not much. They look pretty pathetic right now, but I am hoping they will recover and look good and then we can keep them maintained. But I left the clean up mess last night and now I have to deal with it today. It will probably take me a couple of hours to do, and it's 90 degrees outside and I'm putting it off, but I gotta get it done today because I have daycare tomorrow! Aaargh. Once I am done though, I know that I will feel that sense of accomplishment and that feeling of stress free bliss that some people feel over yard work. I can honestly say though, that no matter how much relaxation I may sometimes feel over my job well done, I'd still just rather pay someone else to do it! :) So I guess my hate wins out!