Yard Work as Technique for Easing Agoraphobia

 The Sven-Saw is my friend. Even so, getting the muscle memory back to work is going to take a little while. And this particular stump is going to take a little while and then a longer while. After all, I haven't used it for about... whoah, thirty-some years? Eeep. But it's fall yard work season, and needs must.

As someone who has recently gone through the first intake session with a professional counselor for agoraphobia and for grief (which are the two things my GP requested I be seen for), I am now at least technically under care for these things, but anyone who's been through it knows that intake sessions are not quite getting-work-done sessions. They're more like is-this-therapeutic-pairing-going-to-work? sessions. (Signs point to yes. This is a relief.) I look forward to finding out what we can do about various things. In the run-up to this, I have been doing what I can to combat agoraphobia (or more like confuse and distract it) and hopefully lessen it with the strategic use of yard work. During the spring and summer, my goal was "get out and spend seven minutes at least in the yard improving something." It did help some. Also our yard looks better, which probably relieves some of the neighbors.

The Sven-Saw, a marvelous tool made here in Minnesota, enters the picture because there are some saplings that need to be cut off and the little stumps painted with stump-killer before winter. All of them are pretty much broomstick size or smaller, but there is one that's four to six inches wide depending on how you measure it. It's this stump that needs the Sven-Saw, because the stump killer wants a fresh cut to work on.

The biggish stump is inconveniently placed, and I have trouble getting at it. Part of that is pre-existing mobility and agility difficulties. The stump cannot be picked up and put on a convenient cutting frame; it has to be cut off horizontally a few inches above the ground. This is because of where it is: at the corner of the garage where the parking pad meets the alley. Our garage door is perpendicular to the alley. There is a small strip of land along the alley side of the garage which some long-ago person enhanced with a concrete-walled raised bed. It's not very tall, but it's tall enough to get in the way at the corner when I'm trying to get at this stump. It (the stump) is tucked in to a little notch of bare soil at the corner of the garage, where the alley-side raised bed strip ends before the length of the garage does. It (the raised bed strip with little concrete walls) stops early because some sensible person thought ahead, and designed it so that it is nearly impossible to run over the little concrete corner of the raised bed when trying to park. (I suppose someone might manage it, but they'd probably sideswipe the whole alley wall of the garage and then be too far in to successfully maike the turn into the parking pad.) Anyway, there's a little postage stamp of bare earth at the alley corner of the garage that runs a foot or so along the alley side of the garage before the concrete wall of the raised bed kicks in. And that's where the stump is.

Because of the concrete, I can really only get at the stump from one angle. While I can go at the cut from either side, it's all in the same cut, with a total variance possible of maybe fifteen degrees. Maaaaybe. This is due to the slight slope and where the pavement of the parking pad is. It's a tricky spot. Add in my mobility and agility difficulties, plus the dizziness and balance issues that have recently been added to my character sheet, and the necessity of bending over and trying to saw horizontally, and it turns into a two day job with a lot of breaks for resting while my gyroscopes reset.

All the other bits needing cutting and then painting with stump-killer will be much easier, barring one or two that are doing creative things around some pipes outside the house.Take the hard one first, get it out of the way. That's the plan. And it's a good plan. 

It's just going to take a little longer than I thought.

Have you done yard work lately? If so, how has it gone? Any stump issues or adventures?

Reading Is Educational: thanks, Naomi!

 In 2015, Naomi Kritzer wrote a story called "So Much Cooking." I really love it, even though it's a hard read these days. It's about a pandemic, and about making do, and about taking care of each other. One of the recurring plot points is that the narrator, a food blogger, doesn't have some significant ingredients for any recipe they try, so they improvise and this teaches the readers of their food blog useful tricks to get by when supplies are uncertain, partial, patchy. It was the account of making cookies without eggs or oil that made me think of possibilities. And the Sven-Saw cleaning actually went better than I expected.

It happened because there does not seem to be either mineral oil or mineral spirits or WD-40 or any other semi-plausible things around the house. This does not usually matter for me on a daily basis, but the Sven-Saw needed to be cleaned, and it was going to be a bigger than usual job for ADHD reasons. As is true of so many things around here.

It would be one thing if it were just the abundance of resin that the smallish tree stump I needed to saw was dispensing with every stroke. That might not have been too bad, but it got more difficult because as I was assessing what to do about this, I got distracted and had to attend to something, and then realized that meds were overdue, which meant fixing something quick to eat so the meds didn't bounce, and the Sven-Saw sat in the kitchen, patiently waiting. 

I don't know if it was patiently waiting or what. It might be patient. 

I try not to anthropromorphize everything, because some things don't like it.

Anyhow, it may or may not be patient. What it definitely was was resin-laden. And the distraction took long enough that the resin was doing its best to dry on the saw blade, and this is not the way a person is supposed to take care of their tools. Which set me looking for the right thing to use, and not finding either right things or wrong-but-maybe-worth-a-try things... until I realized that this was possibly solvable by the peanut butter trick.

The peanut butter trick is a thing someone taught me to remove glued-on or stuck-on labels from glass containers. When soap and water doesn't work because the adhesive in question doesn't care about soap or water, you take a very small spoonful of peanut butter, and you generously coat the label you're trying to remove with it. Go out beyond the edges some, because having it soak in at the edges is a win. Put it down and ignore it for at least fifteen minutes. Then come back and look at whether the peanut butter has at all soaked into the label. It probably has. And the now-altered label may well have changed its mind about soap and water. Try some soapy water and a scrubby or a rag or whatever you've got. Chances are, the label and its adhesive will now come right off.

I did have peanut butter, and I knew the peanut butter trick would probably work, but there wasn't all that much peanut butter, and what there was, I had plans for. So I tried an alternative.

Friends, I am here to report that it is quite possible to clean semi-dried tree resin off a Sven-Saw with mayonnaise in place of peanut butter. I did do some additional work on some recalcitrant bits with some dry baking soda, but honestly, some of those marks might have already been on there before I started. I'm pretty sure the Sven-Saw blade is shinier than it was.

But we probably should either lay in some of the usual remedies, or figure out where they have got to if we already have some, as is sometimes the case in this here palace of ADHD. 

Anyhow, reading is educational, or a least good for jogging the memory, the saw is clean enough to put away until tomorrow, when I'll take up work on that stump again, and I am a relieved saw caretaker, because whew.

Have you used any interesting substitutes in household problem-solving lately?