Slept terribly last night. I don't know if it was an effect of the heat, the humidity, having worked outside for a while (I spent about an hour de-Virginia Creeper-ing the back yard and also broke down and bought eight large celosias as a reward for doing it, and planted them) or having stayed up too late getting sucked into the Internet Hole of Doom (seriously, I should never log on within 2 hours of my set bedtime).

I will present you with a short list of Plants I Now Hate:

1. Poison Ivy. Well, that one's self-explanatory; I think most people hate this plant.

2. Virginia Creeper. Yeah, it's innocuous and maybe even pretty and I think birds eat the berries. But the thing is a destructive evil. Around here, it will EAT houses whole. If it gets into your lawn, you will never get it out again. You will be pulling it off the sides of buildings and if they are painted, woe unto you. (I think I just bumped "get the garage sided" over "get new windows put in the house" based on what the creepers did to my five-year-old paint job)

3. English Ivy. Much the same as Virginia creeper, perhaps a bit less aggressive. But still evil.

4. Dayflower. I really didn't want to put this one on here - it has blue flowers! It's pretty! Yes, but it will also drown a garden if you let it. I spent a large part of the time I wasn't ripping down Virginia Creeper pulling this stuff up. It's like a really bad clingy needy boyfriend; you can't get rid of it and it just looks at you with a mix of sadness and contempt for even trying.

5. Mulberry. Though I think I have to share the hate with the birds that eat the berries and then poop out the seeds in inconvenient places. Where I then have to crawl into to cut down the resulting trees. And you can't pull it out of the ground, even in seedling stage.

6. Nutsedge. But it's normal to hate this, if you live in the Arklatex area.

7. Privet. Again like the mulberry. Incredibly prolific, can't be pulled, must be cut. Shows up everywhere.

8. The mystery plant that my mom says is Ampelamus albidus when I describe it to her (but I'm not 100% convinced). This is a twining weed with milky sap but its main claim to infamy is that the sap smells to me like teenage boy sweaty t-shirts that have sat in the sunny backseat of a closed car for about a week. The first time I crushed some of this while mowing, my instant reaction was, "Dang, I better ease up on the B vitamins or something; they're beginning to make my perspiration stink." Eventually I learned it was this plant - which apparently my neighbor has in his yard and just lets grow wild (and creep over into MY yard).

It is a sad irony that this thing is commonly known as "honeyvine." Ain't nothing honey-like about it.

Of course, it could be that it has some weird chemical that 99% of the human population cannot smell, and I am in the unlucky 1%

9. Any grass that is in my lawn that is not St. Augustine grass. (Some of them may be OK elsewhere, but not in my lawn).