I’m back. Yeah, I know my hair is shorter and is a different color, but I swear, it was like this when I woke up one morning.

Everyone has asked me what I’ve been doing over the summer. Yard work. Yeah, a wuss like me did yard work, all summer.

I won’t disclose who I worked for, just in case you may have surveyed my work over the summer, but I will tell you I did get to use some cool tools and machines. I used a backpack blower, which I found out can blow a snake over 10 feet, a pressure washer, which can cut a snake in half and a tractor that could hunt down and run over hundreds of snakes in a mere matter of seconds.

When I wasn’t hunting snakes, I was hunting weeds. I kept Round-Up in a holster. Dandelions didn’t stand a chance. Sometimes I sprayed snakes. They didn’t stand a chance either.

The job made me feel like a man. My boss had a tractor I rode all the time. I felt manly. He had stuff for me to burn, I felt manly. He had a huge chainsaw. I never used it, but I held it a few times. I felt manly.

I took the job because I wanted to feel manly. As a newspaper guy, I don’t do any actual labor, other than throwing a Frisbee around the newsroom. I saw this summer as my chance to get strong, be a man, build stuff, lift stuff, burn stuff and, of course, hunt down snakes.

Manual labor isn’t always the most fun thing to do, so I tried to make it interesting. I staged a fight to the death between a brown recluse spider and a worm. The worm actually won, with a little help from my foot.

I did time trials on the mower and tried to cut down a small tree with a Weed-Eater. What is more manly than that?

I did get some actual work done this summer, at least, that what my boss told me. I did apologize for not doing everything as well as a professional, and for accidentally cutting all of his extension cords in half with the hedge trimmer (I thought they were snakes.)

So, for those of you who were curious, it was a good summer. I may not be stronger, I may not have a good tan, I still may not be able to use a chainsaw, but I can say one thing, snakes beware.