"When you go to work on Monday, people always ask you
if you had a good weekend," he'd say. "My answer was always, 'No, I own my own home.'"

His point, delivered with a mischievous grin, was always that for homeowners, weekends are all about duty, chores and never-ending house and yard maintenance.

This Monday, when I slouched in my car on the way to work, a quite real pain in my neck made me remember Alan's words.

I was the poster boy of the overdone Monday-morning homeowner.

The weekend's work had involved grass-cutting, weeding and weed-whacking, tree and bush trimming and other general yard stuff.

The tree and bush work was the real heavy
lifting.

Taking advantage of free or cheap seedlings years ago from local tree and conservation groups, I had planted them all over my little half-acre.

Despite my own unique planting style--putting them in crooked and shallow and surrounded by rocks-- many of the saplings had actually lived.

Not just lived, they've thrived, to the point where branches are shooting up and out like the hair on Don King's head.

This isn't really a good thing, because there's nothing all that appealing about trees that look like the boxing promoter.

To get more normal looking oaks, pines and hollies, I knew the time had come to take loppers, sheers and trimmers in hand and begin cutting these trees down to size.

The trimming went fairly well until I came to some ugly, green juniper bushes planted to fill a steep hillside in our front yard.

Seeing that the bushes had exploded up and out to the point of blocking out our yard, our house and the sun, I knew it was time to cut them down to size.

Two hours and more than a dozen huge trash bags full of trimmings later, I was done.

Where I once had bushes,
I now have nubs. Nice, round nubs. Green, bushy nubs. But nubs, none the less.

On Sunday, I attacked beds full of weeds, more mature trees and azalea bushes.