Was it age, or was it natural idiocy?

Sunday I tackled my hardest grounds-keeping chore — trimming the vine at the top of my condo’s rear, 8’ fence. This was the first trimming in over six months so there was a lot to cut.

First I had to carry down the aluminum extension ladder — getting that down the fire escape is the hardest part. I had previously trimmed with our long handled battery powered trimmer, so all I had to do now was get up there on the ladder, clean up what remained on top, and then pull up and cut the part that hangs over the back of the fence like Veronica Lake’s hair. There’s a 25’ tall wall below our property, so the back of the fence is nearly impossible to access.

After climbing 6’ up the ladder, I used a hand-held battery powered trimmer plus a pair of manual clippers to cut the vine which I then tossed down “near” the yard waste bag on the ground. I could only reach about 2 feet on either side, so I had to move the ladder around a dozen times. That’s a lot of up, down, up, down.

What I noticed almost immediately was that the powered trimmer was not working well. I changed the battery, but that didn’t help. I oiled the blades — this required a trip back up and down the fire escape — but that didn’t help either. I ended up doing most of the actual cutting with the manual clippers. It worked, but if I had anticipated this I would have purchased a better tool.

Having now made my way to the end of the fence, while filling two of those large, brown, yard waste bags, I swept the remaining debris into a couple piles to collect on Wednesday after our compost trash is picked-up for the week. Then I stashed the ladder under the fire escape to live there for our Dry season. As I was putting away my gear, I noticed the “other” trimming head for our hand-held powered trimmer. I had forgotten about that.

There’s a decent chance that when I do this again in a couple months I will find that the tool works fine with this other set of cutting blades. By then I will have forgotten how annoying it was to have to cut all this by hand (not really that bad, to be honest).

So was this age related, or just me being me and forgetting I had something? Impossible to say. I certainly did similarly stupid things at half my age — and some really stupid things at one fifth my age.