So Easy a GIRL Can Do It

Let me just put it out there and say that Kenny and I have been married for just over two weeks (15 days, thankyouverymuch!), but yet he already has me performing manual labor. Sheesh, the things we do for love!

We have a list of several projects to do around the house and one of them was to clean our back yard. I love our backyard, probably because it’s huge and the giant trees make me feel like I’m in a suburban forest, but it turns out that trees can be a pain in your ass. During fall and winter the leaves fall and it’s really pretty, but then during winter you wake up one day and realize they’ve blanketed anything and everything on the ground, leaving you with a huge mess to clean.

Enter the greatest. tool. ever:

This, my friends, is my new favorite toy and yes, it’s so easy even a girl can do it. It’s the Black and Decker 12-Amp Corded Electric Blower with Vacuum Kit, and it was the best $70 we’ve ever spent. Whew! Try saying that three times fast.

We picked up our leaf blower around 10 yesterday morning, and by noon we were outside putting it to work. And this is what it was up against:

Soon, Kenny and I were blowing leaves into piles all over the yard:

(See, I told you it’s easy enough for a girl to work)

We took a quick lunch break and then got back to work. The coolest part about the leaf blower, besides the fact that it’s a vacuum, too, is that it also mulches all the sucked up parts into little bits and pieces. I can only imagine how many bags we’d have if it didn’t slice and dice all twigs, sticks, leaves, and pine cones.FIVE hours later (have you seen the size of our yard? ugh), and 12 trash bags later, we were finished.

The “before” picture is up above, but here’s the “after.” I think we did a pretty darn good job, if I do say so myself.

Since I knew blogging about this was a must, I took pictures of all the dirt accumulated on our clothes after we came back in the house. I even took a picture of the dirt that somehow made its way through my jeans, under my shoes, below my sock, and onto my feet. MY FEET! How does that happen? Well, since I don’t think you’d want to see that, I took a picture of my glasses:

And that’s just a teeny fraction of dirt.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that cleaning the yard was completely easy; as I’m writing this, I’m completely wiped out, sore, and my fingers even hurt to type. But I guess that’s what happens when you do yard work for five hours. I can only imagine what it would’ve been like had we not bought the. greatest. tool. ever.