On DIY, de-treeing and desperation

Due to a complicated set of circumstances, I am currently living alone in a house which is far too big for me to look after, but which I'm not in a position to sell. Just lately it feels a little bit as though this house is out to get me. I don't know whether my brother (who used to live with me) did a lot of maintenence stuff without me noticing, or whether things have just recently started to go wrong, but I seem to have an awful lot of things to fix lately. For example, yesterday the toilet door fell off. Right off. The top hinge came out of the wall and it fell flat on the carpet. Once I'd established that I hadn't crushed the cat, I started to panic about how I was going to manage to put it back up. Nobody ever teaches you how to rehang a door and, when you look at it lying there all heavy and horizontal, it does seem rather like a two person job. Despite this, I dug out the tools and got stuck in. And I did it! Granted I got a splinter in one finger, cut another, dropped the door on my toe and somehow managed to hit myself in the face with an electric screwdriver, but the important thing is that the door is back in place. For now anyway.

Having proven my skills with the door yesterday, I decided to tackle the garden today. It's been a couple of months since I mowed the lawns, so they bore a certain resemblance to meadows. I think that's quite an attractive look but I doubt the neighbours agree so I went back into the shed for the second time in as many days. On approaching the back garden I saw a larger than usual weed growing in the middle of the lawn. But no, that's not a weed. That's an oak tree. Some bastard squirrel has risked death-by-cat to bury an acorn in my garden and has just left it there, and now there's a thigh-high oak tree where no oak tree should be. A brief but effortful attempt to haul the thing from the ground was enough to establish that it liked that spot, it enjoyed the view from that spot and it had no intention of leaving that spot thank you very much. Back to the shed for a spade. Insert spade in ground. Lever. Handle comes off spade. Right. Good. So this is how I came to be kneeling in the middle of a meadow, digging around a small oak tree with a large serving spoon and wondering why nothing is ever easy. All I wanted to do was mow the lawn, not molest arboreals with culinary equipment. Sigh.