Gardening question for the day

Q:  How long should it take you to plant a dozen pepper plants?

A:  Too long.  Plus another hour.

Because you know that one cannot simple go outside, dig a hole & throw the plant in the ground.  Oh no.  First you must find the shovel & trowel that the dog has taken from on top of the picnic table and hidden somewhere in the front yard.  Then you have to cart the plants from the back porch, through the house, avoid a potentially catastrophic bone-breaking fall from overly friendly cats trying to rub up against your leg while carrying too many plants at one time, through the front door without letting twenty million flies in, schooch humongous sloppy dog out of the way, across the front yard avoiding same overly friendly sloppy dog, and attempt to open broken garden gate propped open by two 2x6's using your foot so the dogs don't follow you into the garden.

Once securely inside the garden, you realize that you still need additional items to make planting of the peppers easier.  Bucket for compost, gloves, trowel/shovel that you eventually found, etc., and after procuring said items realize that that you really should weed some of the area where the plants will be going.

Willy-nilly weed the blueberry bed (where the peppers are going).  Toss delectable goodies over the fence into the goat pen where the goats act as if they haven't been feed in a week and a half and listen to the sound of goat skulls being cracked against each other.....all over a handful of weeds which they will eventually turn their nose up at because there was a bit of dirt on it.

While in the garden, I notice that the bed containing our grape vines is wildly overgrown.  Start weeding that bed. Finally realize that I haven't put my gloves on so am now picking thorns out of my flesh because the stinking horse nettle plants that have taken over.

Take a short break for a beverage and to cool down (it was in the upper 80's you know) and go back out to plant the peppers.  Again.  But before I can get to the garden, I notice that I haven't finished weeding my soon-to-be herb garden and since I'm in a weeding mood I move over there and finish that job.  Of course the chickens are suddenly interested in this area and I have to shoo them away (i.e. scream like a raving lunatic) every ten seconds or they will destroy what few plants I have yet to "chicken proof".

I can now go back to planting the peppers.  Again-again.  Except I now realize that Herman has (yet again) his head stuck in the fence.  I could just leave him there and hope he'll eventually maneuver his why-do-I-have-horned-goats head out of there, but it is awfully hot outside and I don't want him to get overheated yelling and struggling.  So I walk over to the other side of the pen (because it would just be too easy if he kept getting stuck on the near side of the pen) and get his head unstuck.  While I'm on the far side of the goat pen, I stop to admire the wild phlox growing back there.  Then start walking farther down the path trying to ID some other wild plants, taking a sprig or two here and there and bring them in the house for later positive identification.  Since I'm at the house and near the water faucet I start to untangle the 100' of knotted hell mess of hose that will allow me to water the pepper plants that I will eventually put into the ground.

But now that I have the hose handy, I may as well top off the goat / chicken water buckets and give them some cool water.  So.  Back to the peppers.  Again-again-again.

And this time I actually did what I set out to do several hours earlier....plant the peppers!!!

Although I have no idea why it took so long for me to do so.