Adventures of a homeowner: Episode 1

How to use up a day in X steps:
0. Go to take a shower.
1. Think "I'll fix that leaky faucet in my bathtub"
2. Drive to Home Depot and buy a faucet rebuild kit.
3. Come home and turn off water to the house at the curb.
4. Begin to disassemble faucets.
5. Realize you forgot to pick up a seat wrench.
6. Drive to Lowes to buy a seat wrench
7. Come home and continue disassembling faucets.
8. Discover that the seats (the things the faucets screw into) are old and corroded and trying to use the seat wrench to unscrew them just strips the things the seat wrench connects to.
9. Realize that stripped seats means A) you cannot get them out to put the new ones in and B) you cannot put the old faucets back in. This means you can't turn the water back on at all. Also realize it is the weekend, and calling a plumber will be difficult and expensive.
10. Call a friend with more experience at this to help out.
11. Friend comes over, takes a look, and immediately goes home for more tools.
12. Use extractors to undo seats.
13. Assemble and install new faucets.
14. Turn water on and realize it is leaking into the walls.
15. Repeatedly turn the water off, fiddle with the faucets and turn it on again until it is mostly stopped leaking.
16. Send friend home with the promise of food and beer at Highlander
17. Take shower approximately 5 hours after original plan to.

Adventures of a homeowner: Episode 2

My back yard is full of kudzu. In the past few weeks I have made the occasional attempt to kill what I can. The big limiting factor has been the fence. Most of my back yard is behind a fence. The fence was double padlocked, and I did not have a key. My friend Allen and his huge bolt cutters visited this week and the gate is now open. Today, while waiting for Allen to come help me with a plumbing problem, I decided to invade the back yard again.

Armed with my machete and giant branch pruner, I started hacking my way into the brush. The first thing I found was a rock retaining wall! It's just on the other side of the gate and drops a foot or so to the ground. Hack! Hack! Hack! Kudzu fall left and right. I pull yards of the stuff to me and out of the shrubs. Some of this crap is traced back to a two inch thick source vine.

I manage to fill two or three big bags with kudzu and I'm heading back for more. I put my right foot out to stand on the rock wall. Suddenly I drop. It turns out that under all the kudzu is a gap in the rock wall. A gap the size of my foot. I pitch forward. Suddenly I realize something:

I am falling forward. Fast. My lower leg is stuck between a rock and another rock. Soon, the full weight of my fat self will be pushing down on the legbone. I can see it now: my right leg is going to snap like a fucking twig about three inches above the ankle. This will hurt.

Giving up on any hope of recovering the fall, I yank my leg up with all my might. Now I am halfway over, leg in the air, about six feet above the ground. I manage to throw my head down and basically do a somersault in the air and land rolling on my back into the shredded kudzu below.

My right ankle is scraped to all hell, but aside from that, no major injuries. I've managed to use up all my luck for this year by not twisting my foot off.

Carpe dirt

Ok my filthy hippie friends, now is your chance.

I has a kudzu. A fuckton of it. I'm clearing my back yard and I'd like to do something useful with it. What I really want to do is burn it, but that's not doable right now.

So I've been told it makes excellent compost. This is good. I want to start growing some stuff. Compost is good for this. So, my filthy hippie friends, my question to you is:

What is the easiest way to turn kudzu into compost? Stress is on easy, with a side of cheap.