Like a rotten egg
The weather is getting better and that means gardening. With my wife out of town for work, that means I have to do it. The nice old couple who sold us the house told us we had to spray certain trees and bushes with this 2-in-1 protective formula that you have to mix from two separate bottles yourself. One is just a sulphur solution, ripe with the smell of rotten eggs. The other is some chemical that I didn't bother reading up on too much.
So I'm mixing up the concoction in a bucket, 2 parts sulphur to 1 part the other stuff, and it occurs to me that I have no funnel and no ready to go spray bottle. I have to cannibalize a half-empty bottle of Fantastik and make a funnel out of junk mail and Scotch tape. So I get large quantities of the sulphur and chemical mixture everywhere and the spray bottle is leaking all over my hands. I decide to read the label on the side of the sulphur bottle. It says: if ingested, induce vomiting. "Good to know," I think to myself. It also says that it's okay to be sprayed on any deciduous tree. After spraying my Japanese maple, I decide to read the label of the bottle of the mystery chemical: if ingest, do NOT induce vomiting. Goody. It also says: Do not use on Japanese maple.
So I probably just killed my tree and I stink like sulphur and have likely poisoned myself since I can't induce vomiting nor suppress it. And, you know, I don't think it matters because it's great BBQ weather right now and I feel pretty damn good. I decided to get reacquainted with an old friend, otherwise known as reading outside soaking up enough sun to get skin cancer, which I did a lot back in grad school (the reading, not the getting skin cancer part) but haven't had much time to do since starting work. I would probably go to the waterfront to read and bring a chair and sun myself except that the waterfront doesn't have beer.
No longer concerned with stinking of sulphur and poisoning myself with gardening chemicals, I am content to poison myself in other ways. Alcohol-related ways. So I'm now sitting in the backyard sucking back a couple of Grolsches, BBQing up some pork chops for lunch, and reading a popular history book that seems unduly concerned with emphasizing just how gay Alexander the Great was. Aside from being flaming gay (or at least strongly bi), Alexander was a notoriously hard drinker and I'd like to think that the great man would strongly approve of my afternoon plans. So crack open the BEvERage of your choice and enjoy that sunshine.
Labels: personal
Decreed by King Aardvark @ 3:06 p.m.
7 Comments
7 Comments:
I had to work a bit this weekend. Sucks -- but it's nothing that can't be done by remote login, so here I am sitting in my sunroom with the breeze blowing through, and a fishpond gurgling away on either side of me, and a cat curled up on the other chair, checking the status of a machine in Europe, and filing a status report on the crisis by email.
Only thing missing is a beer.
Hmm, yours doesn't sound quite as good as mine. No beer?
I would like to note that within two hours of writing this post, the clouds came over and it started to pour rain. Figures.
Beer came later: one of my hoarded bottles ofSapient Trip, with dinner.
You do realize that you have a Canadian Tire right down the street from you. You can buy a funnel. They only cost a buck or two. Cheapskate.
It's always good to read the labels before you mix up garden poisons. It's also a good idea to know why you're using them. It sounds like you mixed together a concoction of "dormant spray", and it may well be that there are chemicals at your local garden store that do the same job without threatening to poison either you or your maple tree.
No fair flinching at the price of such things. You buy property, you buy responsibility.
Oh, and after one applies "dormant spray" properly with a wand-type pump-style sprayer, one is entitled to the best beer. But don't drink it until you've washed the spray out of your face.
Yes, I should buy a funnel. One day I'll remember.
I figured that the one label would apply to both, considering they were meant to be mixed. I was mistaken. I was even more mistaken thinking that the two would be opposites.
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