Trumpet Vine

I hate trumpet vine.  I only found this out recently.  A year ago, I didn’t know what it was.  Today, it’s my nemesis.

It grows all over my back yard.  I’ve been systematically hacking away at it for months.  Digging it up, watching it sprawl and send out shoots that grow a new head, much like the Hydra in Greek mythology – cut off one head, another grows in its place.

(Actually there is a plant called the hydrangea named for that mythical beast – but it is WAY easier to dig out.  I know this, I have tested this, because I hate them too.)

Hydrangeas are long gone.  But the trumpet vine lives on.

I went out to face it again today.


It has mad tendrils and grows super fast.  And it seems that while I’m cutting down this part, another piece will pop up and grow somewhere nearby, but just where I can’t see it.


And that it’s laughing at me.

When you read about trumpet vine online you find it often paired with words like “Murder” and “obliterate” and “willing to try anything”.


You quickly reach a point where you realise the plant is winning.

It’s taken over the garden, and I am not even kidding when I saw if I had a time machine the first thing I would do is go back in time and find whoever planted it and STOP them from doing it.

I do understand that once upon a time it probably was little and pretty and it seemed like a good idea.  Grows easily, birds like it, pretty flowers, what’s not to like?


That does it. Where’s my flux capacitor.

After a while I needed a break.  My arms felt like they were put on backwards and my back felt like I had given an elephant a piggy-back ride through a swamp.

So I went inside to play computer games.  Admittedly this sounds like the early cop-out of a teenager who just can’t be bothered.  But I really had spent hours digging a medieval moat around the thing, and I was legitimately tired.


I’m famous for overdoing it. And being a drama queen.

For some reason I have been re-playing the Witcher 2 lately.  It’s one of those games where you have to be a guy and you have to have swords and kill monsters.  I like it.  I really don’t like the fan sites for it, because I’m a girl and they tend to think I’m either doing it wrong or I’m just trying to impress a nerd.

Or you know.  Both.


Disclaimer: This is a re-enactment only

But then I get to this monster, the Kayran.


These live all over Australia.

This thing is famous for being hard to kill.  Tendrils whip around and slam you dead in an instant.  This is one of those sequences everyone changes the game from hard to easy for, or loads and reloads about a thousand times, while screaming and kicking things and saying things like “just one more time, I’ll try just one more time.”

Me, I took forever to kill this thing.  Which is frustrating, because I play games to have fun, not to feel like I’m doing a harder job than the one I abandoned to play games in the first place.

And the whole time, this crazy woman is on a bridge nearby screaming “trap it with the Yrden!” (Yrden is a trap spell.  I like stating the obvious.)  She says it over and over.  “Yrden!  Trap it with the Yrden!”

Or maybe she says it once, and I re-loaded so often that I just *heard* it a million times.


She looks exactly like this. And is about as useful.

She said she was casting helpful magic, but I didn’t see her do anything at all.

Next time I see someone struggling with something incredible difficult, I’m going to just stand there and tell them that I am casting useful magic.  It’s not like they could prove I’m not.

So anyway, after a short time of that (ok several hours) I gave up. Felt like fighting the damn trumpet vine would be the easier task.

It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong.


That screaming is not me, it’s the plant. My struggling made it angry. And hungry.

I’ve had to stop again, because my elbows are screaming and I’ve just about dug my way to France and I STILL can’t get all the roots out.  Oh, and the sun went down.  Piker.

Tomorrow, though, I’ll be back out there.  Running around madly, hacking away at it.  Casting Yrden spells at it.

Unless of course it rains.  Oh PLEASE let it rain.

Then I can stay inside, and work on building my time machine.

Oh, and while I was busy with all of this, the kids had so much chocolate, mud and vegemite that they ended up looking like cheetahs.


Chocolate, mud, vegemite… your three basic food groups.

Yes, it’s chocolate.  Or mud.  Or vegemite.

If only I knew some kind of trap spell to keep them in one spot while I worked.

It’s probably good that I don’t, because I would never stop using it.