oops, supper’s ready…please stand by.
Alright, I’m back.
Let’s see…oh yeah! The chores. Mowing as usual, finishing that is. The lawn(s) are basically separated into 3 parts; the front, the back and the “back forty” which doesn’t live up to it’s name being the lawn of a house situated in an urban area but it is on the other side of a hedge from the “back yard” proper and it was the “back forty” that needed doin’ so I did it.
We’ll forget about everything in between so…
The last thing on the list was figuring out how to water the small flower garden that resides out between the the front of the house and the sidewalk which was previously planted and tended by the original family of the previous resident and that duty had now fallen upon us. The tools at my disposal to accomplish this watering task were as follows:
1. A standard hose nozzle for a garden hose.
2. An old style sprinkler that washes a “fan” of water back and forth.
3. The “soaker” hose that I had removed from said garden last year before the cold set in.
I had tried using the nozzle previously and had achieved moderate success even though the screwed-together hoses would only allow me to gain 3 to 4 feet around the front corner of the house (the spigot being all the way around in the back) which did allow me to barely water the far end of garden from 8 feet away and dribble a fair amount of water down my forearm, off the end of my elbow and onto my foot at the same time. Being the proud owner of one pair of sneakers this obviously wasn’t going to work more than 2 or 3 times at the most.
I then tried the old sprinkler which, despite it’s age, worked as if it was just hauled off the shelf of the local hardware store instead of being crammed inside the “hose cubby” attached to the back of the house for who knows how long. After wiping off all the cobwebs and other unmentionables I brought the thing out front along with yet another length of hose figuring that firing the sprinkler up at the current end of the hose(s) would successfully water the neighbor’s dog so another length was most definitely needed. After attaching the new section of hose I screwed on the sprinkler and set it between the house and the garden, walked around to the back of the house to the spigot, gave it a twist and jogged back out to the front to see if anything had exploded. The first thing I noticed was that I had given the spigot a bit more twist than I needed and that I was doing a nice job of watering the sidewalk, the house and one of our cats that happened to be sitting on a shelf on the other side of an open window observing these events completely unaware of the possibility that he might actually become part of the proceedings. A few drops did mange to fall on the garden with each pass but not nearly enough to offset a wet cat so something else had to be tried which was about the time I began to notice that my foot was yet again being watered which abruptly ended the fun and games with a sprinkler rountine.
So now to the soaker hose.
Now I had never used one of these devices before so I when I saw that bright yellow stripe on one side of this very flat black hose my brain immediately came up with the brilliant conclusion that this means the equivalent of “This end up!” and so I did. Actually, I thought I had done a fairly decent job of running this “soaker thingy” in a carefully placed race track patternaround the rectangular shape of the garden and with the yellow stripe running along the length of it, it did kinda’ resemble a little two lane country road running in and around the plants, enough so that I almost expected to see a miniature tractor pulling a tiny manure spreader haul out onto the road from behind one of the petunias.
Now that everything was in place I trotted back to the spigot and gently cracked it open (the cat had returned to the window and I really didn’t want to face the repercussions of wetting him down twice in one afternoon) and went back out front to see what was happening. I squatted down in front of the garden and waiting for the pressure to build in the hose when I noticed the hose was beginning to sprout little thin fountains of water along the length of it which were growing into longer thin fountains of water by the second. It might interest you to know that it takes me a bit longer than a few seconds to get my creaky butt off the ground since my right hip’s recent, wonderful introduction to arthritis so by the time I managed to get to my feet the not so little fountains of water had happily sprinkled me from head to…yup, you guessed it…foot(!) but the garden was finally getting the water it needed.
Anyway…after some minor adjusting and changing of footwear I had the whole shebang up and running along quite nicely. I did find out later that a soaker hose is supposed to be placed yellow stripe down so the little jets of water can “soak” the ground, hence it’s name but the little fountains just look so nice that we just left things the way they were which just makes the neighbors look at us that much more strangely.
I figure that my poor waterlogged sneakers will be dry by next Tuesday.
