So I was in the garden, weeding furiously, pulling up these things with leaves and little blue flowers and two-foot roots, and it’s all going nicely. I’d grab the base of the plant with my nice thick-gloved hand, and tear the leaves off. Then, with my narrow hand-spade (or whatever it’s called… Graybo! Help!) I’d dig around the stump to a depth of about six inches, so that I could grab the top of the root and pull that long pale-green tapering snake out of the soil. Highly satisfying.<\/p>\n
Then it starts to spit a little.<\/p>\n
“Just a touch of rain,” I think to myself, “I can soldier on through this minor inconvenience.”<\/p>\n
Tear, dig, tug.<\/p>\n
Tear, dig, tug.<\/p>\n
And then…<\/p>\n
Little worm comes to the surface for the lovely water. I perform the tear…<\/p>\n
“Poor little guy. Here, let me help you.”<\/p>\n
I gently scoop him up with my hand-spade and deposit him safely in an area that I’d already cleared.<\/p>\n
“Oh, and your friend. Sorry to split you up like that.”<\/p>\n
Worm number two joins his buddy. Then I see that I left their girlfriends behind.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, I can carry two of you at once. Hop on.”<\/p>\n
Another worm transfer. Oh crap. There’s still more of them.<\/p>\n
I decided at this point that I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day driving the worm minibus, and retired to the worm-free safety of my computer.<\/p>\n
Speaking of worm-free operating systems, the latest release of Ubuntu Linux (5.04, Hoary Hedgehog) is a beaut. Amongst other things, the new GNOME (2.10) is much snappier than the previous version. And I can get on with converting my WMAs to MP3s at last (in process as we speak).<\/p>\n