Leaves, Pinestraw, and Such

All of last week,  some "coastal system" with tons of rain and wind went up past us and then was really kind and came back down to get us with another dose.  We didn't see the sunshine for a whole week, and when it all finally cleared out, we were left with a yard full of leaves, pinestraw, sticks, pinecones, and other fun!

keep in mind that is about 1/20th of our yard!!!

In the past, we have had a lawn maintenance company that took care of our yard regularly and would then take care of these big cleanups. But this year, Josh inherited a riding lawn mower and has been taking care of our lawn cutting himself, which means there is no lawn company scheduled to clean up the mess.
And considering I am home more, I figured it would be a very nice wife thing of me to do to take care of the leaf clean up during nap and school time.  Well, I figured it would take more than one nap time, but I didn't quite realize it would be a whole week affair.  All project were on hold while I spent just about every free minute I had tackling our beast of a fall yard.
The whole time I was doing it I had a few things that kept running through my mind.  Primarily was probably "man I hate this freaking yard"/"our next house will not have this big of a yard" and other things of that nature (no, we are not moving any time soon, but we have begun talking about the possibility and I am now adamant that we will downsize our yard the next go around!).  Secondly was "Josh better really appreciate this/be impressed when he gets home" (for the record, he was...).  And finally, I kept thinking there has to be some really good DIY leaf raking tips I could find on Pinterest...I never did find any...unless you count the fact that I quickly learned pinestraw is harder to rake than leaves, but much easier to bag.  Other than that, there's really just the pile-rake-pile again-rake again method that I seemed to have perfected.
As of writing this, our yard clean up has taken about 10 hours, 41 bags and counting,  one painful blister on my thumb, and a very, very sore back.  Josh and the boys did bail me out a bit tonight, leaving me with about an hour of work tomorrow until this project is officially complete (hopefully!)...

  But there's always a plus side, right?!?  Or at least I always try to look for one.   And in this case, the plus side was that I managed to get a whole big pile of leaves that the boys LOVED playing in.  We even had friends over today and all the boys went crazy in there.  Can't beat good ole fashioned free fun, eh?!?

If I'm going to be honest, though, as nice as watching them play was, I must say in this case the cons definitely outweighed the pros!  This project has been completely exhausting and time-consuming, and now that my "I am woman; hear me roar" moment is over, I will most certainly pay someone to do it in the future...especially considering the yard is already quickly filling up again.  

So, yeah, I'm pretty much totally over our yard. Anyone else been raking up a storm this week?  Or were you smart enough to just hire someone?