This weekend we removed and disposed of 3,380 pounds of green waste.

To clarify: the “we” being Steve, myself and the latest round of suckers visitors, Steve’s parents. Consider yourself warned: if you come to our house with the intention of “helping” you will be automatically issued a project, a Walstonling and your very own bottle of ibuprofen. Come to think of it, our house has become much like that of the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

You see, in our day to day lives we are deprived of any sort of productive activity that doesn’t involve the counseling or redirection of two emotionally volatile children. So you can understand how it is that we lose our ability to think rationally when it comes to getting to focus on actual task oriented activities. Activities that can be accomplished without having to stop every 5 minutes to keep someone from, say, drawing on an inappropriate person or thing with a Sharpie pen, or hauling the contents of the sand table into the kitchen.

The name of the game this weekend was berry abatement. As in, gone. Period.

We started with this:

And ended up with this:

As a matter of course, we all also ended up looking like this – basically, like we have been in a scratch fight with a badger:

Not only were our guests kind enough to deal with the daily toil of yardwork, but they were also here to experience the magic and wonderment that is time-change-sleep-transition. I can say with some certainty that the idiot who came up with time changes DID NOT HAVE CHILDREN. This household already gets up at dark-thirty. Now, thanks to the lame time change, we get up an hour BEFORE dark-thirty. So not only did Bill and Judy get to give up a perfectly good weekend wrenching their backs and pulling their muscles and being ordered around by Porter the Angry Dictator, but they got to have the equivalent of the WWE in their bed by 5:00 a.m.

As I have been reflecting on all the work-vacations people have been providing lately, I think I have realized that we are missing the bigger picture here. One of my former professors from school started a B&B where people come to get the “farm experience”. As if. I remember thinking it was the most ridiculous idea in the world. What crack-smoking maniac would pay to go on vacation and actually pay to work? Oh. Well. I think I have just answered my own question.