It’s a dan­ger­ous time out there for Cal­i­for­nia gar­den blog­gers. One of them just had a run-in of a thumb and a chipper-shredder, though for­tu­nately with an out­come way short of what you’d see towards the end of Fargo. (If you don’t know Fargo, here’s the snow­globe that came with the deluxe collector’s let­ter­boxed edi­tion VHS tape which mir­rors the tone of the film per­fectly. It memo­ri­al­izes the infa­mous chipper-shredder scene where Trooper Marge Gun­der­son comes upon the crim­i­nal try­ing to dis­pose of his lat­est vic­tim. When shaken, the snow in the globe is tainted with lit­tle red flakes. Magical…)

Another blog­ger broke her arm, tak­ing her away from post­ing for a while.

Not to be left out, a lit­tle over a month ago, while work­ing on my house repair project, I ended up step­ping into a pile of scrap wood that hap­pened to have a big spikey nail that was point­ing straight up out of one of the boards. My work shoes–some bat­tered old Skecher ten­nies that were hip in the late 1990s–were no match for the nail and…you know the rest. I’m per­fectly fine now, but two days of painkillers and the week of crutches were no fun.

I really should have bet­ter shoes for work­ing out­side, I thought after the lit­tle acci­dent. And this week­end I finally got around to replac­ing my unsafe and ugly tennies.

So here they are: some indus­trial Tim­ber­land work­boots with steel toes and puncture-resistant soles. They weigh as much as a small sack of pota­toes but are sur­pris­ingly comfortable.

So was this overkill for work­ing out­side and around the gar­den? They should be great for forc­ing a shovel into the patches of the gar­den where the earth is seri­ously hard­pan clay. But they’re def­i­nitely noth­ing to wear when try­ing to weave gin­gerly through a bed of new seedlings. I haven’t had a chance to plant any­thing over the last cou­ple of days, and I haven’t had a need to finesse my way around tiny lit­tle plants. But I think I’ll like them and that I’ll actu­ally wear them gardening.

What­ever the ver­dict, one mem­ber of the house­hold is already happy. Here’s Scooter, who doesn’t give a hoot about my new boots. But every new pair of shoes that enters the house means that there’ll be a shoe­box accom­pa­ny­ing them. The cat approves.