Ibuprophen is my friend.

I don’t have one of those electric or gas powered hedge trimmers and to be honest, I’m a little afraid of them. When I was in high school my mom was outside with the hedge trimmer while I, ever the selfish teenager, was in the house being self absorbed I’m sure.

Mom came in the house and went straight to the bathroom and something about it just didn’t sound right. When I checked it out – there was blood on the carpet. There was blood at the front door and on the porch. I went to the bathroom door and heard “go next door and get Kenny, tell him I need to go to the hospital!”

AGH-H-H-H!!!!! (that was me.)

I ran next door and told our neighbor that my mom had an accident with the hedge trimmer and needed to go to the hospital. Then I went out into the yard where the hedge trimmer was laying and …yeah … I looked for fingers. I had no idea if there were fingers out there but I was prepared to pick them up and put them in a baggie with ice.

Turned out that her little finger was broken and she needed a bunch of stitches, but all her fingers were attached. So you can see why I might be a little frightened of that particular landscaping tool.

Which is why I was outside today with the old fashioned kind of clippers hacking away at the bushes in front of the house. (spell check REALLY hates my grammar.) Part way through I realized that I had owned this pair of clippers for over 10 years and they’ve never been sharpened so you can imagine how easy they were to use. Heh. I had skipped doing the bushes last year so they had a lot of growth that needed to be cut off and a lot of shaping to be done.

Yard work, or any manual labor for that matter, is not my favorite thing. It would help I suppose if I did it every now and then so it wasn’t such a shock to my system when I finally do get my butt out there to get it done. But I don’t and it is.

It’s been 6 hours since I was out trimming the bushes. My arms feel like lead, my hands shake when I lift a drink to my mouth, and fine motor skills are non-existent due to the screaming arthritis pain in my thumbs right now. But the worst? My back. Oh.my.God.

Once I get the laundry folded and my lunch ready for work tomorrow, I am curling up in bed on my side with a pillow between my knees and praying it’s not worse tomorrow.

I’m pretending that’s actually a possibility or I might have nightmares.