Lawn Care and Jesus Christ

Nah, just kidding aboot the Jeebus part. I have an aversion to lawn care. Mainly cuz, well, I don't care. I'd much prefer if I had some sort of ground cover plant thing that did not require me to walk in a pattern with spinning blades mere inches from my tootsies. But this will not come to pass. Back when we first bought the house I was sort of gung-ho about the whole idea of taking care of my lawn. That feeling of pride wore off quickly and even though it's not big by any one's standards, there's enough of it that it does require attention (HEY-OH!).

I grew up in apartments and so I didn't have any experience at all with lawn care. Other people took care of that stuff (or as one landlord did, just paved directly over the grass. Classy). I had seen commercials where suburban type dudes took great interest in their lawns and would defend them against the dreaded onslaught of weeds and/or dandelions with their very lives. There were lotsa dandelions and odd looking leafy formations on my "lawn" out in front of the house. "Hmm, I should go get me some of them there spray things to knock down those weed things," I thought to meself. So I did. Did you know that most of those are engineered for use on weeds showing up on say, concrete driveways and such? Yea, I didn't. Reading is hard.

I used this product (RoundUp I think) on what I determined to be the biggest offenders of the area. I sprayed the fuck outta them. I looked down at the milky-white stuff (ew) on the leaves and felt great about my new-found home ownership and being now by association: a lawn care expert. I went back inside and got myself a beer cuz I fucking deserved it. The next day I went back out to survey my newly weed-free lawn. Oh, it was weed-free alright. It was also grass-free. I had in essence created little crop circles of death. I had a grass holocaust on my hands and I was responsible. "Hmm, that's fucked up," I thought. "I wonder why this powerful herbicide killed everything in its path instead of what I had meant to destroy?" Doesn't it know the difference? Nope. It does not. Oh and all these years later the only thing that will grow in those very same circles of death? Weeds. Big, crab-grassy, pervasive and invasive weeds. Nice.

When we first moved in I had purchased one of the reel push mower dealies. They work fine as long as you keep up with the growth of the stupid grass. I, um, didn't and found out that when grass reaches a certain height, all a reel push mower will do is knock the blades of grass over as it passes harmlessly over them. Well mother fuck. I had a gas-powered weed whacker thing but it's loud and noisy and made my hands hurt. Plus, it would shoot grass juice all over my pretty little sundress. Have you ever tried to mow a lawn with a weed whacker? It ain't fun.

I went out a couple years back and bought myself an honest-to-goodness gas lawnmower offa some dude who had it on Craigslist. He even had a 2-gallon gas tank that he threw in as an extra bonus. I brought it home, stuffed it into the basement (it was almost winter) and forgot about it. Flash-forward a couple of years later and I'm at work complaining to a buddy about having to weed-whack my ghetto lawn again. He asked me about the lawn mower I had bought. Oh, that. Um, I don't know how to use it. Hee. I didn't know, seriously. He somehow didn't kick me in the balls and offered to show me how to use it that Saturday. Deal.

One of the problems with having this lawn mower stashed in the basement is that I don't have a bulkhead access for the basement. The only real way to get the thing into and out of the basement is to lug it up the basement stairs and then drag it across the kitchen floor to the back door. The biggest issue with that is when you happen to have more than half a tank of gas in the mower, it tends to leak out as your dragging it up the stairs. Awesome. So whatever, I learn how to use the mower (much obliged there Andy) and proceeded to use it fairly regularly, spilling gas all over my stairs every goddamn time.

Then I ran out of gas. Now I am a special kind of lazy. I still (I'm talking over a year now) haven't gotten more gas for the mower. Yup. A YEAR. Whatevs. I kinda hated the gas mower anyway for many of the same reasons I hate the gas weed whacker thing. So it has been sitting in a corner of my basement mocking my manhood ever since. Up yours mower, can't you see I'm not manly? Sheesh. I even looked into getting one of those battery powered mowers but they're more money than I was willing to spend. So what to do? I bought myself an electric weed whacker (with the giant 100 foot cord) and I'm out there like a retard weed whacking my whole lawn again. Sigh.

At the beginning of the spring I was out in front of the house dreading another season of lawn care when the kid who lives next door came over. "Hey Mr. O'Malley," he called, as I freaked out realizing that that's actually my name now...so old. "I can mow your lawn for you if you want whenever I mow my mom's lawn." YES! You, sir are a savior. He said he'd do it for $10 and I could just pay him whenever I saw him next. Holy shit. Dude, I'm gonna pay you $20 for your much appreciated service. Now chop chop! Get to mowing!

And for a solid month and a half this was my greatest accomplishment. I had procured a landscaper for super cheap. I remember the first time I pulled into our driveway and looked over at the freshly mowed lawn. Best. $20. Ever. It ruled. Then about 10 days ago, after noticing that my lawn was in need of a trimming I saw the kid. He had a cast on his arm. Oh Fuck You. "Hey there Mike," I called out to him. "Uh, what happened?" He broke his goddamn wrist. 6 weeks in a cast and then 5 weeks of physical therapy. Oh, you dick. That's the whole goddamn summer and right into early fall. WHO'S GONNA MOW MY LAWN FOR ME? YOU EVER THINK OF THAT? Oh, I need to sit down for a minute. Oh you putz. Ugh.

So there it is. Right now my lawn is so overgrown that I'm thinking of calling in the EPA to see if I can get it declared a wildlife preserve or something. I just don't want to fucking walk around trailing a 100 feet of cord getting covered in tiny bits of grass and debris. My Chuck Taylors are supposed to be blue, not streaked with green grass ick. Plus it's been raining here non-stop for going on a month now. This is gonna suck. I'll try to remember to take a picture of the lawn tonight but no promises. My brain is very tiny.

Chucky in the Neighborhood

The other day I was driving back home from the Home Depot (what? I can do manly things sometimes...) and since I live on a busy street (a stupidly busy street really) I like to take little side streets to avoid the main bulk of the stupid humans that always seem to be in my way (what's up with that anyway? Get out of my way already. I've got shit to do). There's one intersection in particular that is just a clusterfuck. It's just a 4-way stop but there's a convenience store on one corner and a chinese food place on the other. Throw in a couple of bus stops and it can take FOR-E-VER to get through there. And then there's the added bonus of bad tempered thuggish teenagers milling around the store. Oh, and I've personally watched 2 different accidents where someone waiting at the light is broadsided by some complete tool backing up from a parking spot in the convenience store parking lot. That, my Internet peeps, takes a special kind of stupid. Lynn has these people in abundance.

I have a few choices to bail on this intersection when it looks like I won't make the green light. All I have to do is go down the little side street and the bang a left which will dump me right back onto my stupid street. On the day in question I did just that. I pulled up behind the car in front of me at the stop sign and waited for them to grow a pair and take the right already. As I'm sitting there wondering if I should have just sucked it up and gone to the intersection anyway (this guy was clearly terrified of driving and/or couldn't figure out that the pedal way over on the right will make the car go VROOOM!), I looked up and across the street at this shitty blue house (unkempt lawn? check. crazy out-of-control bushes? check. peeling paint and general disrepair? check and checkmate). As I was sitting there wishing that my neighborhood wasn't so crappy I looked up at one of the bedroom windows and what do you think was staring back at me? Chucky. Yes, THAT Chucky.

I honestly let out a gasp (there goes my manliness cred again). This doll was splayed in the window Jesus style and just glaring down at me. Look, I understand. It's a doll and it can't "get me" but it sure as hell spooked me. I've never seen Child's Play and I never, ever will. Why is that? Well, I'm a timid woodland creature and cannot deal with horror movies no matter how campy they might be. I think the not liking horror movies thing stems from the fact that my parents took me to see Jaws when it came out. I was five. FIVE! That ain't cool.

Yea, so I'm looking at Chucky and he's looking right back at me when I realize that whoever lives there is my neighbor. Awesome. I got to wondering how long this thing has been lowering property values in my neighborhood (hmmm...perhaps this is one of the reasons I had such a hard time trying to sell my house a few years ago) so I went to Google maps to check out the street map. They did that "Street View" mapping thing last summer over here so I moved the little camera down to this house and made the camera pan upwards to the window. Sure enough, there was Chucky. A little blurry, but he was there. So tonight on our way home from work, the Wiff and I went back down that same side street and stopped the car in front of that same house. I snapped the picture below so that you, my faithful reader, could get a sense of the lovely sight that greeted me. And to those living in this house: please don't murder me. Thanks!

click on the pic to super-size this creepy mofo

Maybe Lynn Ain't So Bad

Spring is here and with the warmer temperatures we will soon be opening our windows up. This is also when I start to regret buying a house on a busy street. I love my house, don't get me wrong, I just don't like where it is. When we were trying to sell it a couple of years ago (oh, and holy crap am I glad that we didn't end up selling it too by the way. With the economy the way it is currently, I'm quite happy with a mortgage that I can afford thank you very much) one of the main motivators was how much traffic noise there is here. Say what you will about winter but at least it's quieter in my house when all the windows are closed. I dread motorcycle season.

This house is the first place I've lived that wasn't an apartment. When we were looking I briefly thought about looking at 2 family houses but quickly realized that I was really tired of living above, below or right next to someone else. I wanted a single family house so that whatever noise there may be, it came from us. Although on a busy street that really isn't true either. But I digress (whatta surprise!).

I spent the first 16 years of my life living in a first floor apartment of a little 2 family house. The people who owned the place lived right upstairs and didn't allow my dad to park his car in the driveway. Another weird "feature" of that place was the fact that we didn't have any real doors (the exception being the bathroom door). All the doors were removed and replaced with those accordion door things. Y'know, the ones that don't offer anything in the way of privacy? Nor do they block sound or light which is a problem if your bedroom is right off of the kitchen. You know what sucks? Being a 15 year old boy with 3 sisters and no real door on your bedroom. We eventually moved to a shitty complex (Bryant Terrace HOLLA!) a few blocks over. I still have relatives living over there and the apartments are not a depressing as I remember. I think it may have been my own attitude (shocking isn't it?). I finally got a for-realsies door though.

After the college thing (long story) I moved out and had a series of apartments until I met Amy (The Wiff). Our first place together was this tiny place in Allston. Since neither of us drove it didn't bother us that there was never anywhere to park in the neighborhood. Unfortunately this apartment was near a couple of frat houses so 2 a.m. wake-up-calls for drunk morons smashing things on the street became the norm. When these instances started happening on Tuesdays, we realized that maybe we should move. Oh, that and the time that somebody got stabbed right below our bedroom window (actual quote: "Dude! You STABBED ME!!"). Yea, that may have been the motivating factor.

We then moved to the International House of Whack-jobs in Somerville. I should have guessed that this would not be a great place to live when I got hit by a car on my bike while I was on my way to meet up with Amy to see the apartment. Kind of a cosmic warning shot across my bow (except it was in the form of a Jaguar and it did in fact hit me). The apartment itself was ok but there were a number of incidents that made us move out a little more than a year later. The one that stands out was I was in the living room and I kept hearing this huge THUD! sound coming from our kitchen. I walked into the kitchen and sort of stood there waiting for the noise to happen again. I didn't have to wait long. THUD! Hmm, it's not coming from the THUD! kitchen, it appears to be coming THUD! from the apartment directly THUD! above THUD! us (there were 6 apts total in the building, we were on the second floor). What the fuck are they THUD! doing up there?

So I went up the back stairway to our neighbor's back THUD! door. I knocked (ok, I pounded) on the door and waited for the door to open. Nothing. THUD! THUD! THUD! It was increasing in intensity. I banged again. Finally a little dude opened the door and he was holding a baseball bat. Ok, didn't see that coming. He didn't seem hostile or anything and so I asked him if he could keep the noise down. Meanwhile the door was still creeping open (the whole building was sinking in the middle due to it being constructed of balsa wood and paper-mâché on a crumbling foundation of stale cookies) to reveal that there were 2 other guys in there also with bats standing around the kitchen table. Laying on the table was a giant slab of some indeterminate meat (goat? lamb?). They were tenderizing it. I cannot make this shit up. I said "What was all that banging anyway?" So, one of the guys showed me. He reeled back and gave the side of meat an all-mighty whack. His once white T-shirt I noticed had a fine mist of blood covering his belly. He grinned at me. Carry on men. I'll be perusing the apartment listings of the local paper thank you very much.

At the time I had a job working for CSG doing energy audits for people (same company as the Hate Bus, different gig. I'll explain later in another installment of Vocational Errors) so I got to see quite a variety of places that may be potential rentals. As it turned out, one of my customers had a place for rent right down the street in an old funky building. He had cut up this gorgeous building into 8 separate apartments of descending quality. I think we got the flagship apartment. The landlord guy (Dan I think?) was a grade-A nut job who cut so many corners on his renovations to that place that it had reached the point where things were really starting to fall apart. But there was no one beating up dead animals there so we moved in.

Everything seemed ok for a bit and then we started to notice that not only was Dan odd but he was also home all the goddamned time. He had all these bizzarro rules and regulations which he posted all over the common areas of the building. He drove us crazy (Amy more so as he would talk to her a lot). In the basement below our apartment was an illegal apartment. The guy who rented this one was a male stripper who would practice at home with the windows open. Oh, come on man. How am I supposed to compete with that? Invest in some fucking shades will ya? He would blast this god awful techno bullshit that would thump thump thump me into a blind fury. I would stomp on the floor trying to get him to understand that there is a pasty white guy up here who not only doesn't want to be reminded of how he is soooo not qualified to be a stripper but would like a little quiet please. Sometimes he'd turn it down and sometimes he wouldn't. He didn't know that I knew where the fuse panel for his apartment was. I would just turn his power off. I dunno if he ever figured out it was me or if he just thought his stereo was too powerful.

It was all these little battles and petty arguments over space that made me pine for a place of my own. A place not attached to someone else's place. We've been here since 1998 now and have come to the conclusion that all those projects that we figured would be "the next guy's problem" are in reality our problem. We ARE the "next guys". Last week I had a friend of mine who does construction come over and give me some advice on a kitchen renovation. This could be huge. I think I love my house.