Applied Squeezology

Heck, I'd rather be running missions right now!

That's what I usually think on Friday mornings, starting work. So why not do it?

I took time off this Friday and run 4.5 km to Osterley to help Mrs A, who had Alzheimer's disease and could no longer tend to her garden. Neither could Mr J, her husband, who was caring for Mrs A. When moving to their current house, he had hoped the garden won't turn into a jungle like the one at their previous place. But the vegetation grows everywhere when not maintained, that's the nature of things.

It was the first GoodGym visit for Mrs A and Mr J, and the husband asked me if I could trim the bushes in the garden. Of course! Seeing the scale of the back garden, which was certainly not 15 square metres (that was, according to the mission description, the size of the front garden, I where I had nothing to do), I explained to Mr J the 90-minute limit on GoodGym missions. He asked me why did we have this limit, to which I had no good explanation, apart from quoting the rules, and my favourite line: "I'm running to help another person after I'm done here. We want to support as many people as possible today". That was true, so I got right into the trimming.

The vast stretch of lawn in Mr J's big garden looked impeccable, but all the bushes at the edges needed some serious cut back. The right-hand side of the garden was taken over by brambles, and I couldn't see the shrubs I was supposed to trim. Good that I had packed my brambleproof gloves! Assumung that blackberry bushes classify as bushes, I started there. It felt wrong to prune the brambles to the same height as the bushes, so I took out the whole plants, even though I knew they wouldn't fit in the garden waste bin.

Mr J came over for a chat a few times and entertained me by a guess that my accent was from Australia. He was a nice chap to talk to while packing the cuttings, which I started to do just over halfway through the mission. It was a good decision as there was lots of garden waste to remove from the lawn. Mr J was determined to squeeze as much as possible into the bin, and gave me rake to push the trimmings down, without scratching myself too much. I managed to fit much more cuttings in the bin than expected, but a good amount of them just couldn't defy the limits of the three dimensions. I raked them into a corner and suggested to Mr J to make use of the fourth dimension - time - to our advantage, and schedule a follow-up with another GoodGymer after the garden waste collection next week. Hopefully, he will get rid of the rest of the cuttings and have a helper to do more pruning soon!