Well, that was stupid but satisfying.
Went out to spray the poison ivy again on Saturday, but the sprayer broke. I shall have to bring it back to Home Depot and ask them what they can do about it. A single use for $30 is not acceptable.
To get out my frustrations over that, I chopped down the patch of ferns near the porch. Turns out they were also blocking the downspout from the roof, so it was a good thing I yanked them. I'll need to put some sort of extender on the downspout to get it away from the edge of the porch.
The pachysandra under the ferns was fine, but I ended up taking a pile of it out anyway, since I need to deal with the downspout. I suspect I'll take out more of the pachysandra, since I don't much care for it, and I would rather turn that spot into a tomato field for the rest of my Redundant Seedlings. (Which are getting quite leggy, being in the insufficient sunlight of my back porch. Gotta do something with them.)
And then...I did the stupid thing.
There is a large azalea bush in my backyard. It's like a big round puffball (in bloom). But there is some sort of other shrub that grows under it and puts up giant branches sticking out of the azalea. My neighbors told me that the previous owner would periodically have it cut back, but it comes up every year.
Well, says, I, I will come up with a permanent solution. (Yes, go ahead and laugh.) I bring home from my mother's a small handaxe, which was in turn fetched from my grandmother's many years ago. There's a fair chance this axe is 70 or 80 years old. It also hasn't been sharpened in forever, which was a bit of a problem.
All I remember is as some point sitting on the ground under the azalea bush (well, in the azalea bush), hacking like a madwoman at the base of that shrub with the dull axe. It bit through the outer bark just fine, but once we got to the soft pulp, it was all, "Ha ha ha! I am soft and fibery and I yield and twist before your dull steel! Fuck you!"
Somewhere under my azalea bush are the twisted, hacked-up remains of a thoroughly wrecked shrub.
Meanwhile, my right shoulder is sore and stiff, and I am forced to acknowledge that the only cure for this is moving it more, which I have taken the time to do every couple of hours for the last two days, in between bouts of lying semi-catatonic in the comfy chair afraid to move at all because OW OW OW. It is finally loosening up.
But I pulled out that shrub, by Crom! It will probably grow back next year, because these sort of things can't be killed, and I'll have another go at it. I'll get the axe sharpened first.