Mowing, mowing, mowing

In the 6 weeks since I returned from vacation on May 12, I've mowed the front lawn completely three times, and the back yard once.  It took two weekends to mow the back yard.  So that's 5 days including mowing.  Four of those were weekend days, and one was squeezed in on Tuesday May 14 while I was still on vacation.  While the actual work of mowing only takes an hour or two, it's still a big deal to me, I might well think about it all weekend, checking the weather and so on.  In the past 6 weeks, only two weekends have not included mowing, and one of those was filled with heavy raining.

I can't complain, really, because it's nice to have nicely manicured grounds.  Latest idea on what to call the home is Cool Pad and it does seem pretty cool with the nice yard.  I could imagine the bikini clad women coming to my pool parties.  I have never had a front yard that looks as nice as the one I have right now (thanks to good rainfall, irrigation system, and almost regular mowing) and the new back yard, if a little rough in patches, is a miracle, it seems to have dropped in from another world, like Alamo Heights, or the grounds of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California which I remember visiting as a kid.  It takes some imagination to see it that way, but the grounds of my house have certainly improved immeasurably in the past few years, and still more improvement is hoped for as the trees mature, the patio is expanded, etc.

On the weekend of Jun 22-23, I mowed the entire front lawn, including the north and south sides, from about 8PM to 9:45PM on Saturday.  I devised a new pattern for mowing the lawn in which the entire lawn was covered with the same home-to-street diagonal pattern.  That had several advantages, including not having to stand nearly in the street (mowing inward as I have often done), and not dividing the yard into ad hoc sections.  Plus, I was constantly moving away from the electrical cord connection, which made the cord handling easier.  I think the diagonal pattern yielded a nicer looking cut also, but the main part of the nice appearance is the now thick mostly St Augustine grass.  Funny that this spring we've had something like St Augustine weather to go with it.

I could continue mowing in the darkness because of the lighting in front and the south side.  The motion detector light on the north side wasn't much help, and I inadvertently ran the mower over the cord once.  The cord was unharmed, almost sticking to the grass.

On Sunday I checked out my second string trimmer which a friend asked me to do when she was over last Monday.  She had done nice weeding around some of the trees in back last Monday, but wanted to use my electric trimmer for the rest.  She was doing this work in explicit compensation for my gift to her of an old animal carrier I was storing in Lyndhurst.  That is a 5 foot long and 4 foot high carrier, suitable for the largest dogs.  I had originally purchased it in 1996 when going to San Francisco, I wanted to have the nicest possible carrier for my cat in the back of my minivan.  I think it cost almost $200 but that didn't bother me because I always wanted my cat to have only the best.  Anyway, I told my friend she could just have the old carrier, which needed cleaning, but she insisted on doing some work in return for it.  Since I was still considering the animal carrier a gift, I also credited $50 for the work to my friends virtual account, which she has only drawn from once and currently has a $415 virtual balance for doing some housework and yard work which she volunteered to do when unemployed earlier earlier this year.  I warned her that I can only honor about $2000 in withdrawals on any particular month, but she wasn't worried about that.

I wasn't asking my friend to do any of this work, though I certainly appreciate it.  So when I mentioned to her on Sunday that I had checked out the trimmer and put it by the Oakhurst door, she seemed weirdly offended.  I was just thinking that I was reporting having done what she asked, like a good dog.  Anyway, her work has added significantly to making Cool Pad even cooler.

Checking out the trimmer (and I also trashed one old trimmer that hasn't worked in awhile) was on the checklist, and it got done, and that was about the first thing I did for the yard on Sunday.  I did a tiny bit of edging around the patio to check it out.  I also used the grass cutter around the patio.  Then I did some hand trimming using a tiny yard scissors around Lyndhurst itself, then, after a big break, the big job was that I did some trimming across the front of the house with the grass shears.  I pulled out the weeds in the crack between the house and the walkway to the front door. And I watered the potted plants, which I do far too infrequently.  And when my friend did the weeding last Monday she left the huge pile of weeds on the grass in back so it could dry out a little before being put into the trash.  She said I could put it in the next week's trash.  So I did.  I scooped all of that up, and combined with the trashed old string trimmer filled up most of my City trash can.