It was a beautiful day in my neck of the woods; sunny, 70 degrees, only a few clouds… a perfect day to go to the beach, take a bike ride with the kids or go on a hike. Except I spent a large part of it doing yardwork. I’m not just talking mowing the lawn. I have a small yard, it takes me about 10 minutes with the mower. I’m talking get-the-shovels-out, put-on-the-heavy-duty-gloves, fill-up-the-yard-debris-bin kind of yardwork. In other words, the kind I hate.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so recursive. But no matter how many times I pull weeds, the suckers keep coming back! In the same spot! I can get the whole f-ing root and a week later a new weed is rearing it’s mocking head at me. Why not use chemicals? A couple of reasons: I’ve tried them in the past with poor results; and now that we have small kiddies running around, we don’t want them rummaging around in our toxic front yard. So, it’s just me against nature.

My broadleaf vitriol was not in vain today, however. All of my digging unearthed a bevy of roly polies. And our four-year-old is into bugs right now. So, we both went outside and checked out the spoils. One even made it into his bug catcher. Now we have a little roly poly living inside a mesh cage on one of our window sills. Our son sometimes calls him armadillo (really, there are obvious similarities), but that’s ok. To me, that little bug represents all that is evil about the outdoors.