Zeno, what a guy

If a woman has a mulch pile to shovel, first she must shovel up, scoop by boring scoop (with apologies to Paramore, but I sing in my head all the time) half of the pile. Then she must trundle these half-pile loads elsewhere, and dump them, leaving the raking of them flat for another day. But, when half the pile is gone, there remains half of the remaining pile, and so on and so on.

There's apparently a long challenging (to me) maths explanation as to why I will not have a pile of mulch blocking my driveway forever here, but I'm starting to wonder.The only way I can tell I made any progress at all is that one corner of the door is uncovered, and there were damp patches under the stuff that got moved.

Sigh.

Fortunately for my sanity, and my back, that's not all I got done today. Our lovely neighbors let me put the cherry tomato plants in their green waste bin, since ours is overflowing thanks to nephew's enthusiastic pruning of some trees. Amazing what you can get a big 13 year old to do if you offer a machete and a ladder. . .

Like Robert Frost's apple farmer, I know what will trouble my yard in spring, though. Volunteers in the making, no matter how much mulch gets shoveled on top of them.

And once all of the vines were cleared away, I could see this lovely thing waiting for discovery.

Crunchy, cold, perfect balance of tart and sweet, this Fuji made a great post-Ultimate hobbit second breakfast for me.

Of course, clearing things away meant I could see that not only am I not the only one with designs on the apples, but there's a bad infestation of powdery aphids on the tree. Time to get out the oil! Perils of seeing reality clearly.