The grass shouldn't be greener on my side

No job is perfect, but mine, I've recently discovered, is ruining my life.

No biggy, you're thinking. You've read my column and you think it wasn't much of a life to begin with.

But I will have you know that, through careful consideration of my options at every juncture, I have deliberately built a life that bears as little resemblance as possible to one lived by an adult accepting of her responsibilities and any desire to get ahead financially, emotionally, materialistically, professionally or intellectually.

It's been working for me. Now that's all ruined. I'm ruined. Cue the death knell for my life that was.

For an article about Bountiful Baskets Food Co-op, I ordered a basket of fruit and vegetables. Now I'm hooked and I regularly purchase fruit and veg there. I'm not ashamed to say that I like foods from the base of the food pyramid, many nonadults do, and I regularly shopped for them three times a week. No preplanning required.

Now I buy a week's worth of fruit and veg … five days in advance. Where is the spontaneity? The time-sucking waste of multiple trips to the grocery store?

What is your world coming to, Pam? You might ask, if you were not afraid of causing me to pop an aneurysm as I try not to think about it.

But a worse tragedy than menu planning befell me this weekend.

I was raking.

And I don't mean the raking one does in the living room to get the big chunks up before vacuuming — I mean lawn-type raking. The deep and thorough kind of raking that pulls up years worth of fallen leaves and dead grasses and allows new grass to grow. I did this.

I don't even have a lawn.

I have a small area around my home fenced off to keep the horses from scratching their behinds on my house and pooping on the front door step.

It's like living in a wildlife preserve, where the humans barricade themselves in a safety compound, built of tall fencing topped with razor wire, amidst roving bands of uncivilized four-legged creatures. The horses are our elephants and giraffes. The cat thinks he's a lion, but he's more like those monkeys that scale the compound walls to eat food from the bravest humans' hands and intimidate the tourists.

The deer and the antelope, well, they're just deer and antelope. They play. It's their thing. They eat pasture and make poop, too. I am assured by research that this is true of most animals. Our cottontail bunnies being no different.

Within my poop-free compound, I have tried to maintain the rustic ambiance of the rest of our property, the air of nature maintaining its course, uninhibited by the will of mankind.

My only influence on this area has been to hack down the tall grasses to eliminate habitat that would encourage snake encroachment. Otherwise the trees, leaves, bushes and cut grasses have been free to flourish and accumulate.

Until I wrote a story about firefighters, who say that too much vegetation around your home is a fire hazard, and a story about lawn maintenance in which the experts said that raking was crucial, crucial, for every yard.

The firefighters agreed with the lawn-care experts.

And now I'm raking. While I've been raking, I see that I need to trim my tree and remove some bushes.

I'm ruined.

(Don't laugh at http://viewnorth40.wordpress.com.)