Yard Work Frustrations

I spent my morning frustrated by routine household stuff that normally shouldn’t frustrate me. But I have a brain tumor, so spending time on anything unplanned feels like I’m losing the little time I have left before surgery.

This week, the frustrating thing was garbage day.

In our city, we have a garbage sticker system. Anything that cannot fit in the regular garbage cans, like oversized items, gets a sticker. Yard waste (leaves, sticks, etc.) has to be placed in enormous paper bags. We add a garbage sticker to each yard waste bag and place it next to our trash cans. 

Someone recently came to help us clean up our yard because we’d gotten so behind with everything related to Brain Tumor Diagnosis. Of all the things I want to be doing right now, yard work is not one of them. 

The woman filled up a lot of yard waste bags and left them in our backyard to take out to the trash. This morning as I took out the cans, I realized that we had no more garbage stickers. I panicked because I didn’t want the yard waste bags to sit around until next week’s pickup. 

So I quickly drove to a nearby grocery store where garbage stickers are sold and bought more. I raced back home and started dragging the bags to the curb, knowing the garbage truck arrives in late morning. Over the past few days, we’ve gotten a ton of rain, so the bottoms of the paper bags were soggy. Several of them split open.

I had to get new bags and transfer all of the yard waste. Then put the stickers on everything. It took about an hour and a half between driving to the grocery store, repackaging yard waste into new bags, and dragging bags to the curb. Ger couldn’t help at all because he was in work meetings all morning.

Not the worst thing ever, but I had other plans for that hour and a half. Stuff I want to get done before brain surgery, like writing content for my various platforms and pre-scheduling it. Even if I’m not directly benefiting from the content while I’m recovering, it’s important to me. It’s been a good distraction and keeps me busy so I don’t think about things like, “What will happen to me after surgery?”

I’m so frustrated by anything that takes away from my time. It feels like robbery. I want to focus on getting ready. I don’t want to focus on things like putting stickers on yard waste bags.