The Modernish Father and the Lawn of Doom

Now that things have finally started to warm up here in Texas, everything’s starting to look marginally less brown. Well, the clover and other weeds are sprouting up at least. But that means the grass won’t be far behind.

For the first five years of marriage, I brilliantly avoided having to do any sort of lawn maintenance, primarily through apartment living and a townhouse arrangement that bordered on living in a retirement community (more on that someday). With the purchase of our house last summer, though, it looks like I’m locked into sweaty, thankless and ultimately meaningless labor out in the yard for the foreseeable future.

I enjoy yard work. I honestly do. I like spending a few hours mowing and bagging and generally escaping from the world each weekend. And I feel a sense of accomplishment when I look at that freshly shorn grass. I’m not a green thumb by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a general idea of what I’m doing and my efforts usually turn out fairly well.

Unfortunately, through no real fault of my own, our lawn seems to be dying. Either that or it’s some sort of rare sickly-brown variety that doesn’t match the rest of the neighborhood. The previous owners shut off the water while the house was on the market and the grass never really recovered last summer despite the billions of gallons of water I sprinkled upon it.

We got a flyer in the mail for some lawn service who’ll green things up for us for a modest sum and I’m seriously thinking about it. I’ve gone out and bought some fertilizer to apply, but I’m not confident in my ability to resurrect the vegetative dead. If I’m going to be out there mowing this summer, I’d rather see green beneath my feet than chalky dust.

And that last paragraph really points out how stupid I really am. I’m willing to PAY someone to come and create countless hours of work for me this summer. They’re not going to cut the grass, they’re just going to make it grow so I have to. I’m so preoccupied with not being the embarassment of the neighborhood that I’m ignoring the fact that if I didn’t have to be outside doing yardwork, I could just sit inside all day and not have to care about how my lawn did or did not look.

The guy next to me doesn’t care about his lawn. The lady on the other side still has her wreath on the front door and a sad tangled mass of Christmas lights hanging from her dead bushes. Why do I care if my grass is green or not? Why can’t I just install indoor-outdoor carpeting like the Brady Bunch and just be done with it?

Don’t know, but that grass is still brown. So I guess I can start writing those checks to the lawn guys.

One paragraph per thought
I’m glad to say that softball went considerably better last week. I managed to go 2-3 at the plate and score once in a 9-0 victory. And the other team even had gloves and stuff, so it was like a real win.

The movie Sniper is really quite long and boring. It’s been on in the background as I’ve been writing and wow – it sucks.

Why can’t they just show a movie on television anymore? Why do they have to have third-rate comedians cooking something or ditzy former models playing poker during the commercial breaks? Nobody cares about these people or what they’re doing. And why are they pairing beauty makeovers with films like The Matrix? Are networks even remotely paying attention to the crap they’re shoveling out now?

I have to admit that a guilty pleasure of mine is watching the “Black-buster Cinema” films on BET. Most of those films are so bad, they didn’t even make it straight to video, just straight to BET. They usually feature characters with colorful names and even more colorful vocabularies. And they never, ever have anything resembling a coherent plot. But’s there’s no bimbo telling me how to redecorate my living room before every commercial, so I’ll watch it.

We went to the zoo yesterday but I haven’t ganked the photos from my camera yet, so I’ll have to post about it later. There’s a guy with profuse amounts of body hair wearing a tank top so you know you’ll want to come back later and read all about it.