Back in 2006, when I finished building the last house I ever want to live in, my wife directed the landscaping of the embankment in the front.   In spite of an extensive sprinkler system some of the vegetation refused to flourish and died over time. The nursery replaced some of it to no avail. Eventually we had a weed garden that sported almost all Nature’s opportunists. I became the West Coast distributor for dandelions and thistle.

Early Spring dawned in 2007 and I noticed what appeared to be a strawberry plant in the middle at the top of the hill. Several months later I discovered it was going viral. Our next door neighbors had a small patch so we surmised it arrived via a bird. We’ve since had to pull out several tomato plants as well. Harvesting the berries was not feasible as the birds and the slugs got them faster than I could find and rescue them. Things continued apace until I went into the hospital in 2009-10. The embankment was left to its own devices for well over two years.

When I finally regained my senses last summer and started maintaining the property again, I discovered the strawberries had taken over the whole embankment. Go figure. You spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars and end up losing everything but the weeds and along comes an edible groundcover that refuses to abate. Someone once observed that Nature abhors a vacuum. Truer words were never spoken.

What we have now is impervious to weeds and the absolute joy of my grandsons-forty yards by 10 feet of unlimited strawberries and no weeds to be seen. The berries choke them out completely. The volume of fruit exceeds what even the birds, squirrels and slugs can decimate.

This spring,  my neighbor came over to talk about one thing or another (my dogs pooping on her front lawn) and was dumbfounded to see the strawberries. They’ve been babying theirs along with fertilizer and TLC now for 8 years with abysmal results. That’s the karma they got for letting their dogs crap all over my property for 5 years. I was simply polite enough not to complain about it. That problem was eventually solved by the dogs dying of old age.

While this has nothing to do with your claims, it shows how tenacious a plant can be. It should be a valuable lesson when dealing with the vA.  Let these tenacious berries be a teaching moment and smother the vA in pleadings and filings until they are inundated in dog poop (which makes an excellent fertilizer, I might add.).

I should justify this post by saying that I called up my vA PCP scheduler and asked to be tested for IHD due to AO. They told me they’d pencil me in for a workup in December sometime and get back to me. I asked with as little sarcasm as possible if that was December 2012 or 2013. The lady became very pissy with me so I voted with the “end” button. I exercised my rights under Medicare and had it done in the last several weeks and I’m glad to announce that the heart attack I had in the VAMC hospital October 2009 was due to medical negligence (septal infarct) and not Agent Orange. I’m glad we got that settled.