Exercise in Futility

With the temperatures dropping slowly and leaves starting to drift off of trees, I feel like we’re in the last throes of summer. Or maybe I’m just hoping that’s the case to avoid the fact that we now have a lawn to take care of. We know we need to get a lawn mower, and soon because we’re quickly becoming THOSE neighbors with our overgrown grass.

Through CraigsList we’ve found a woman willing to sell her electric mower (we want electric for a variety of reasons) but not until the end of the season which means we’ve got about a month and a half of either letting the yard become a jungle, or trying to find a short term solution without buying anything we don’t need. At first I was thinking weed wacker, but this crazy mower has one attached so if it works as it’s supposed to we won’t need that long term either. This for some reason led me to the idea that I could just get some hedge trimmers and take a few whacks at the side yard- I’m smart enough to know that this would make me look crazy so I won’t attempt this on the front yard during the day (which is really just a series of patches of dirt mixed with a few clumps of grass. Since it’s a nice afternoon and since Clint’s out of town for the day selling posters it seemed like an easy enough accomplishment that I could take care of, then feel justified in my nap.

I squatted down to begin manually cutting the grass, then I realized I’d have to first move all of the broken concrete and bricks which have cement on them. Let me back up. Our landscaping consists of what we can determine to be a layer of concrete, with brick, or in the case of the deck- wood, overlaid on it. On the upside this makes the brick walkway running from the back of the house to the front really level, but it’s also probably too close to the foundation to drain, and just generally shoddy so it’s eventually coming out. For part of the walkway that eventually came sooner rather than later when the electrician ran the electric to the garage. Part of my yard clean up plan included moving the concrete pieces off the grass into a pile somewhere where we could figure out another day how exactly we are going to get rid of them.

After moving about ten pieces, avoiding the worms and ants that had naturally come to live under them, then taking a number of whacks at the grass, I decided I was done for the day and walked to the local coffee shop to sit outside and forget about The Project with its infinite smaller projects. Nothing really looks much better and I’m still not sure what to do about all that concrete, but I’ve decided only second to the feeling of accomplishment from finishing something is the sweetness of avoidance and procrastination.