You know it's hot when...

You push your glasses up only to have them slide down almost immediately.

How do you know it's really hot? You push your glasses up, they steam up immediately, then slide back down your nose.

I decided to remove my back lawn, mostly crabgrass, that I never use for anything. Crabgrass is not the surface of choice for lounging, playing on, or pretty much anything requiring contact with the ground.

So I'm digging it up.

In the summer.

What was I thinking? Well, it's mostly that I want to do it now. I'm really good at finding reasons not to do something, so when I decide to actually do something, I better get started.

It will be a series of raised planters with seating scattered around. What it is right now is one largish hole and one middlin' hole, each centered around one of the existing lawn sprinklers. Since I'm having to go out at 5:30am to dig, before it gets glasses-steaming hot, I expect I'll have two really nice 4x4 planter boxes ready for fall planting. Yes, I know it's only July. It's also crabgrass in adobe soil, and requires a pickaxe to break up. Pick, shovel, pull the grass bits out, mix in some perlite to keep the damned stuff from clumping back together, repeat. Fingernail breakage and cursing scattered randomly throughout.

But why dig it up if I'm putting in raised beds? Drainage. There isn't any. Or rather, too much. If I dig down a foot or so, the untouched adobe holds water as if in a bucket. Two, the only way to kill crabgrass is to pull it out. Three, if I dig up the dirt, mix stuff in it, I have a decent growing base and I don't have to add so much packaged soil mix stuff, expensive packaged soil mix stuff, on top.

I'm a desk-bound computer geek in real life, which doesn't lend itself to heavy duty physical exercise. With all the picking and shoveling, I am developing a really good set of shoulder and arm muscles. Just what I need for beating difficult code into submission, or intimidating difficult clients. Yeah right.