Progress, different kind

 This week ended better than it started. I'm still annoyed at the whole mess with the scholarship database; it was worse than useless because those of us who tried to use it, it wasted our time, and we just had to decide on the five or six recipients (my department gives too many scholarships) based on our knowledge of students in our classes. 

But this afternoon, I did get a bit of research work done, and read through the most recent "American Scientist" (the Sigma Xi publication; it had a couple things I might be able to use in future classes).

Then I came home, because I had to move all the cut brush to the curb, and I also wanted to use the string trimmer to knock down some tall weeds. And gather up all the fallen branches and add them to the pile.

The pile is almost as tall as I am. Some of this was cut over spring break, some I cut last weekend, some of it I cut last night and today. I did cut the sucker shoots from around the base of the yaupon holly this afternoon, and some of the privet coming in around the air conditioning unit. 

I also discovered I can use the string trimmer to knock back (but not totally remove) the stupid blackberry vines that have invaded, this might make it easier to cut them out later.

The bad thing is I kneeled in some kind of really foul animal dropping - I smelled it before I saw what I had done. (I washed the jeans right away upon going in the house, it was that bad). The other bad thing is someone was driving around the neighborhood (more than one circuit, so it wasn't just someone passing through) playing either a political speech or political talk show (I couldn't hear much of it but could tell from the tone it wasn't a baseball game) on their boom car and I swan, if driving around residential areas blasting your favorite politician's speeches at everyone becomes a thing, I am moving to a Unabomber shack in the woods. I hope it was just a one-off. 

The last thing I did was to scrape up the leaves that had blown up against the south side of the house (so: where the driveway runs) and hauled them to the depleted leafpile area in the back yard. I used my snow shovel for this; the leaves had gotten wet after they blew up there earlier this winter and they were most easily picked up that way.