I have (well, had) a row of hedges that went along the side of my house. Last summer, the high heat and little rain all but killed said hedges off. The leaves were all brown, and when winter hit, the snow piled on top of them bent the branches outward, blocking my sidewalk. But there was some new growth trying to come in towards the very bottom of the hedges, so they weren't actually dead. I just needed to cut them way back, so the new plant can grow in.

I was trying to get one of my neighbors to cut it back, since he had a power cutter, but his cutter needs to be plugged into an outlet, and my outdoor outlet doesn't work. So we were trying tto arrange a time when we would both be around, so I could plug it into my indoor outlet. But our shcedules never really matched up too well, as much as we tried. I even tried doing this myself, at least to get it looking nicer, even borrowing a pair of heavy-duty (non-power) cutters from someone, but there was too much for me to do alone. But I finally got together with the neighbor, and he got it all cut back. Now, the hedges are cut back to the stumps, where it has plenty of space to grow without all the dead plant blocking it.

It looks so...different. It's almost depressing, being used to seeing those hedges there for the three+ years I've lived here, and now they're gone. But I know it had to be done. The weren't gonna start looking any better just sitting there, brown and wilted. And thankfully, they're not gone for good. In a few years, they'll grow back to their original, bushy glory. I'm considering getting a fertilizer to put down there to help them grow, but I wanna do some reaserch as to what I should use before investing in it. Either way, I'll be happy once they grow back in again.

And now I got to deal with my mother...again. Since my sister lives in the same neighborhood as me, and my mother spends so much time with her, my mother woulld visit her/drop her off from wherever she wanted to go that day, and then drive over to my house to inspect it (at least what she could see without being able to go inside), calling me up to tell me every little thing she found wrong. The hedges were her favorite thing to get on my case about, since that was the part of the house that was actually bad, as opposed to the stuff that was only bad in her opinion. Now that the hedges are cut back, you'd think she'd STFU about that, right?

WRONG!

Now she calls me to tell me how she's so happy she always called me to tell me about the hedges, despite the fact that it was blatently obvious that they were in bad shape, and I've even told her that when she called me before they were cut. But she insists that I "didn't know" that they were looking bad, and had she not called me every day to tell me that, I never would have gotten them cut back.

Really, now...If I do something wrong, it's because I'm an idiot and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. If I do something right, it's only because I was told to do it, because I'm too stupid to have thought of it myself.

I just can't win, can I?

~Kyetsu