Service project

We have a friend here who is also a first year ENT resident at LSU named Jeff. He bought a house when he moved to Louisiana and when we were over at his place the other night he was lamenting the fact that the weeds in his front yard have gotten to be quite unruly. Being no strangers to unruly weeds, we ourselves owe a massive thanks to the young men of the Foothill Ward and their leaders for clearing our backyard so we could landscape before we moved. In an effort to pay it forward, we surprised Jeff by pulling all of his weeds while he was working at the hospital on Friday. We learned several valuable lessons from this experience which you will find below titled, “Things to consider when doing an outdoor service project in Shreveport in August”:

*Start at 5am instead of 7am as there is no escaping the blistering rays of the sun after 7:30am.
*Wear sunscreen…duh!
*Apply a generous amount of bug spray prior to rummaging through flower beds to avoid the lovely appearance of red dots covering your calves, shins and ankles the next day.
*Bring one complete pair of gloves for each member of your party. If you only have one pair and are forced to split the gloves between two people, be sure that you are not both right-hand dominant. If this cannot be avoided, be prepared for spasms throughout the muscles surrounding your phalanges after 4 hours of intense, one-handed weed-pulling.
*Bring an endless supply of cool beverages; preferably a combination of water and electrolyte replacing sports drinks.
*Keep said beverages in a cooler and do not leave in direct sunlight as doing so will turn the beverages to the temperature of snake pee within a matter of minutes thereby decreasing the extent to which they will refresh you.
*Have access to a car bigger than a Civic to haul away the 9 huge trash bags full of weeds.
*Check intensity of neighborhood watch program in advance of your project to avoid having the cops called on you. If this reconnaissance is not available, stuff your belly with padding so you look like you’re 6 months pregnant. This will make you appear less menacing and therefore less likely to scale the wall to crawl through a second-story window.
*Reward yourself with an Icee afterward and ignore the woman working at the register when she looks you up and down and says, “Wow, ya’ll been…runnin’???”

Despite the things that didn’t go so smoothly, we were quite happy with our work at the end of our 4 hours. Now if we could just get the lactic acid buildup to drain from our back and finger muscles, we’d be in good shape!

Here are the before shots…

The after shots…

And one of He-man with his spoils…