Thursday, May 31, 2012

Captain's Log, Day 71: Of Mansions and Machetes

          Okay, so it's more of a fort than a mansion, per se...
          I had an interesting day. It actually started with my haircut yesterday, after which I purchased a new machete because my old one was getting really beat-up. I'm sure you know how it is...buy a new machete and you just can't WAIT to test-drive that sucker, right?
          Oh, you've never purchased a machete? Never mind then. All you really need to know is that I really wanted to go cut stuff down.
          It's a very neat machete. It's double-bladed; has a straight edge on the front side and a jagged sawing blade on the back end. I figured the back end was more decorative than anything else, because I've seen similar blades before and none of them worked very well. Still, worth a shot, right?
          Back when I was younger (and a little shorter), I had taken half an acre of straight thicket and thorn bush and riddled it with hallways and rooms, creating a fortress completely inaccessible to anyone who didn't know which key branch to move to enter the hidden passageway (since the outside was completely composed of thorn bushes, the key branch was crucial knowledge) and didn't happen to have a chainsaw at the time. It was glorious. However, I hadn't been inside for the last two years due to bugs and injuries, so I figured today would be a good day to take a machete to the growth inside the fort.
          Why is it that only prickly undergrowth, like thistles and thorny vines, like to grow in a space that is already composed of thorn bushes? Not fair.
          I was wishing for a weedwhacker by the time I made it to the main chamber, but my machete was cutting through everything nicely. A rather large branch had drooped to the point where it made passage through the fort rather difficult, so I took a few half-hearted swings at it before I decided, just for the heck of it, to try the saw blade out.
          One minute later, I had the branch cut out and dragged over to help bolster the defenses on the south wall. I was also excitedly explaining to my dog Max how well the machete worked. After I finished, I cut down a branch for him to chew on to thank him for being such an excellent listener. I had to wake him up to give it to him.
          So that was my day. I finished clearing out that fort and I started in on an entirely new one a few hundred yards away, in case the first one is ever breached. I also took a thorn branch to the eye and accumulated several thousand cuts (none from my machete, though--a new first for me!!!). Also, mosquito casualties were in the millions...
          Tomorrow, we see if I can cut mosquitoes down in midair. With the machete. Or a weedwhacker. THE WAR IS ON!!!!!!!!!!

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