Snow,Golf, Insomnia and Dog Poo

Insomnia is one of the things I enjoy most about menopause. When I fly at night across country, I always look down at those twinkling lights and think, "Hey, look at all those women watching Court Tv!" Last night Court TV was a rerun and I had memorized all the forensics 

already (it's sort of like a correspondence course) so I was surfing 

through the channels. 

Did you know that there is actually a whole channel on cable devoted to sports? Apparently there must be men who are up all night (though I don't know any) who watch sports. Any sport. Also, apparently, these same men LISTEN to other men talk about sports. I know - think about it! Men LISTENING for hours! Oh well, next life I'll get me one of these.

A guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt was interviewing Tiger Woods. I may 

live in Honey Brook, but Honey Brook is not under a rock, so I know 

Tiger Woods is a great golfer. He was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he has perfect teeth. I haven't the foggiest notion what they were 

talking about but the image of golf just seems to have stuck in my head.

It's been very very cold here on the farm and we've had record amounts of lingering snow. For weeks it seems that the ground has been covered with what started out as lovely drifts of pristine white which aged into lumpy masses of grey sludge and ice dotted with gravel, branches and unfortunately, dog poo. I don't care too much about the gravel and the branches, but as it got warmer and the snow melted more and more, it was all too clear that my dogs had been taking less and less time to find a private place away from the house and were just rushing out, going, and rushing back to the warmth. My front lawn looked like someone was lobbing in poopy with a trebuchet. C, the long suffering husband who barely tolerates dogs, came home during daylight one afternoon and said, well, he said a lot of things, the gist of which was that the four hundred pounds of recycled kibble on the lawn had to disappear or else.

As is my habit when faced with a task, I gather the right tools and 

systematically attack. Okay.  I don't do that, but I like to think I have my own effective process.  I did go out on the lawn to ponder the 

properties of what I needed to remove. Some were pretty close to their original consistency, some had deteriorated to beigey fibrous matter, and unfortunately some reminded me dogs derive no nutritional value from popcorn. 

I kicked some with my toe and it rolled nicely, free of the frozen 

grass and entirely removable. I had a plan. I would get the snow shovel, the broom, push the poo onto the snow shovel with the broom, and fling it over the fence into the pasture.

Didn't work. In the simplest terms, whatever rolled on to the snow 

shovel when pushed with the broom rolled right off when you moved the shovel to the next pile. Okay. I started to sweep the poo from all 

over the lawn to the sidewalk where I figured I could scoop it up all 

at once, once I had it in a pile. I found I could actually get some 

loft on the poo with the broom, and I started thinking about golf 

again, and then I remembered that I had a set of golf clubs in the 

barn, and the rest is history.

I primarily used a Hogan Plus with Bounce Shoe. A nine iron. The 

angle of the head seemed to be most appropriate for the different 

sizes, shapes and weights of the material being moved. I found if I 

got low in the hips, sighted along the shaft and concentrated on my 

wrists, bring the club high and wide over my shoulders on the upswing, I got poopy right over the fence. A warning, though. I recommend you only do this when temperatures have remained below freezing for about a week. You'd have to experiment with different clubs for other weather conditions.