I'm not the biggest fan of yard work. Actually, once I'm immersed in it, it's not too bad.

The bigger problem is - I have no idea what I'm doing out there.

I can mow the lawn and I can do some weeding…but I'm mostly just faking it.

I'm doing what I think I'm supposed to be doing…and I'm probably not doing it well.

Which is probably why, for the first time ever, I ended up having to do some stuff over again this weekend.

It's November, and in my front and back yard that means it's time to pick up the zillions upon zillions of leaves that have accumulated.

In the front it's especially tedious - our driveway is like a wind tunnel that attracts all of the neighbors' leaves. (Though - bright spot! - due to what I believe is my negligence but could be due to a blight of some kind, the big tree in our front yard that used to produce even more leaves has pretty much died. So each year it loses its leaves in April or May, and by October/November it doesn't factor in to what I have to pick up.)

This summer, though, when I wasn't at school working, I took advantage of the girls being at camp to work in the yard. I did significant work back there that I had neglected for a couple of summers. So I had a bunch of bags sitting in my yard, under an overhang, filled with yard waste, waiting for the fall for when my town does leaf pickup. (Framingham sets certain weeks where, along with the trash pickup, they come to get our leaves and sometimes brush. These were all things I didn't have to worry about growing up in Queens and living in Boston before becoming a homeowner.)

Anyway, what you see in the picture above is one of those bags filled with yard waste. As you can see, it's ripped. And what was in it is falling out of it. And that happened with all ten or fifteen bags I worked on this summer.

Apparently, the bags are very biodegradable. Unfortunately, that means the rain and other conditions since July have worn the bags away to almost nothing.

I discovered this circumstance when I lifted one of the bags to bring it from the back to the front for the garbage pickup. The bottom fell right out.

So not only did I spend Saturday picking up some of the leaves in the front, but I also had to buy some new bags to move the contents of each of the old bags into in order to get them to the front of the house.

There's only one thing worse than doing yard work once…and that's doing it twice.

Or, actually, just as bad is finally getting all of the leaves off the ground, and then watching the last leaves fall onto the pristine driveway.

It'll be a while before I'm facing that situation though.

I still have a lot of cleaning up to do.