How many woodchucks could a woodchipper chip if a woodchipper could chip woodchucks?

There's no good reason I don't own a woodchipper.

No, I don't chop down trees and need to dispose of excess branches and blocks of wood. And no, I don't need to create mulch or sawdust. But I really don't see why having a woodchipper wouldn't be really convenient for other things and/or just totally awesome.

Document shredders take way too long and don't even always do that great a job of shredding those highly-sensitive documents and identity-theft prone pieces of mail.

And if you're like me, you tend to let that stuff stack up before you finally get around to dedicating a two-hour block to sitting down and running credit card applications and the like through a shredder.

Boom: woodchipper to the rescue.

Just chuck all that stuff down in there at once. Next thing you know, you're being rushed to the hospital with junk mail particulate in your eyes and lungs — HOWEVER! — now you have no more junk mail!

You're welcome.

But why stop at shred-worthy items? And why not make a game of it? Chores are always more tolerable when you make them fun.

Next time garbage day rolls around, I'd recommend setting up the woodchipper on the front porch, pointing the out-spout at the street, and then when the garbage truck swings by, shove your week's trash down that bad boy and see if you can score it in the back of garbage truck. Or in the garbage truck passenger seat. Or in the garbage truck driver's face. Wherever.

Personally, I'm pretty sure I'd turn myself into the Wayne Gretzky of spewing trash smoothies into the back of garbage trucks, but within a few months or so I'd get bored of dominating the sport at such a high level without any real competition to speak of and I'd stop.

I fully expect at that point I'd probably take to just aiming it out the window at the neighbor's yard and throwing my biodegradable trash in it on an as-needed basis. "As-needed" meaning whenever I had biodegradable trash to throw away. Or whenever the neighbors got on my nerves.

I'd probably also rent myself out to the neighborhood kids on Halloween.

Egging houses?

Smashing pumpkins?

Pssshhh.

Just give me a mini-van with a slide-out side door, a couple hundred or so cartons of eggs, a few dozen pumpkins, a getaway driver, and you better believe I'll be drive-by Picasso-ing the neighborhood houses all shades of Halloween shenanigans.

That's it.

Time to make a trip to the hardware store.

There's not a five-day waiting period to buy a woodchipper, is there?