Two steps forward and five steps back...

Remember the comic strip "Family Circus"?

Every now and then the artist would draw a sequence in which the harried mother would ask one of the youngsters to do a simple chore. "Go next door and borrow a cup of sugar from Grandma."

Junior would happily trot out the door, cup in hand, and immediately become irretrievably side-tracked. A little dashed line would track his progress (or lack thereof) as he trekked about the neighborhood doing everything BUT borrowing that cup of sugar.

My yard work is a lot like that.

Yesterday I decided the most pressing job at hand was to spray the wooden privacy fence (which has seen better days, but I can't afford to replace it, so I have to take care of it) with water sealant. So I headed to my local home improvement giant to buy sealant and one of those pump pressure sprayers with which to apply it.

I first stopped at customer service to return an item it turned out I didn't need after all. Immediately thereafter I was side-tracked by the flowers (a foregone conclusion) and yard ornaments, and found the perfect gorgeous big, cobalt blue pot to use for a bamboo water fountain I'm planning in the future. It took me some time to select it; there was a great brown one, too, with a turquoise-blue interior, and I had a hard time deciding between the two. I also remembered several other items I needed, including duct tape (for an issue with insulation around AC ducts in my attic), light bulbs, paint thinner for clean-up, and two bags of water softener salt.

Congratulating myself on remembering the other sundries, I ambled to the pump sprayers. After standing in front of a selection of half a dozen for several minutes, trying to decide which one to get, it suddenly dawned on me that I already had one in my storage shed.

Time to head to the checkout counter.

While pushing my shopping buggy out to the car, looking at my big blue bowl, I decided I should have gotten the brown one; it was more natural-looking and would better fit the wabi-sabi Japanese style I'm working toward in my yard.

Back inside the store to the return counter; then to select which one of the two available brown pots I wanted (no-brainer cuz one of them had more blue inside); and back to the checkout girl who looked at me like I was a nut case, and possibly up to something. Obviously, she doesn't garden.

By the time I got back home it had started to rain, which brought my fence-spraying plans to a halt.

This morning I got up bright and early (well, bright anyway) with the grandest of intentions and headed outside. In looking at the fence in question, I decided it had a fair amount of green moldy gunk on it and that I was going to have to bleach it before treating it with water sealant.

But before I could bleach it I was going to have to mend the hose I had accidentally lopped in half (in two places, don't ask me how, I don't want to talk about it, but it could happen to anyone) with my big branch clippers a couple of weeks ago.

Now, in order to mend the hose, which was lying over by two pots of bamboo on a side of the house I rarely visit because it's a jungle, I had to go get my pruners to cut out the two sections where I'd gouged the hose with the clippers. By the time I'd gathered everything I needed to fix the hose and gotten the job done (it took longer than it should have because one of the four hose clamps was boogered and wouldn't close properly), 30 minutes had gone by.

Then, as I was gathering up tools and cleaning up my work area, I noticed the bamboo was looking overgrown, and had a lot of dead-looking stalks. Since I had my pruners handy...another half-hour gone by.

Pruners still at the ready, I began to make my way about the back yard looking for strays that needed clipping (it's a never-ending job), and before it was over with, I'd watered all the hydrangeas, filled the water softener with salt, duct-taped the air vent in the attic, got stung by a bee in the armpit (I'm not making this stuff up), the big clippers had come out of the shed for more serious pruning, a huge pile of stuff had been hauled to the curb, and another hour and a half had slipped away.

Finally, back to the job at hand. I filled up my little pump sprayer with bleach

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and water, deciding that was going to be the easiest way to bleach the fence. But the pressure was so weak, I opted to haul out the gas-powered pressure washer. I hooked up my newly repaired hose, burned a large hole in the grass pouring the bleach from the pump sprayer into the power washer tank, turned on the water (hose bib in front of house, had to trek out front), and BLEWSH! - I guess I didn't get that boogered hose clamp quite tight enough - the whole thing blew apart.

So. Ask me if I got the fence sprayed. Go ahead, ask me. Nope. Not a drop. And now I'm hot and sweaty, sitting in the AC eating cereal, and thinking maybe mossy green isn't such a bad color for a fence after all.

It's a wonder I get anything done.

But isn't my brown bowl pretty!