Yardwork and misc musings

It's the weekend (yay!), and yesterday we finally managed to destroy the huge raspberry invasion at the side of the house. After a good four hours of work in the heat, we finally managed to pull out all of the bushes and most of the roots. The bushes were covering an area of about 225 square feet, so it was certainly no small feat. Here's a few pictures of what it looks like now:

After pulling everything out, I raked all the remaining dry old stalks and roots, and the thing looks a little more presentable. I know, it's hard to believe that this picture of devastation is actually a cause for celebration, but trust me, it's better than it was. I can finally start the actual landscaping :)

After all the yardwork, we took the night off and went to play poker at a friend's house. I don't know why, but a night of playing poker with the boys always puts me in a contemplative mood. I think it's the company - we always end up discussing lots of interesting but also very depressing topics. Lots of things to think about and mull over. Last night (and this morning), I kept thinking how hard it is to reconcile being a reasoned, logical person, and a happy one at the same time. I mean, really, if you think about, statistically, there are more tangible things that are bad, than things that are good with this world. Yes, there are happy and beautiful things around us all the time, but most of the time those things do not appeal to the logical side of us. In fact, if you spend enough time thinking about anything happy or beautiful, through logical reasoning you can probably reduce it to something bad (Beautiful sunset? Too bad we're polluting the earth at such a precipitous rate, a few generations from now they may not be able to appreciate sunsets. Cute kittens at our doorstep? Who's the @^&$*^%*#$^% who abandoned them? etc). I guess somehwat of an answer to this is to appreciate the little things in life and realize that sometimes simply the lack of anything bad is actually a cause for happiness. And not to anticipate the next bad thing that's coming up. Because really, statistically it is coming. Whether it's another war, another epidemic or a personal tragedy, there's no escaping it... Just this week in the news we have war, insurgency, the AIDS conference... Need I say more?

Anyway, believe it or not, I am actually sort of hopeful after this grim deliberation. I have a glimpse of a silver lining, that I need to explore a little further... The work of a geeky "life examiner" is never over...

Thought-provokingly yours,