More New Homeowner Fun

As I've mentioned before, I just bought a house last October, so I've been learning all the fun of having my own plot of land. In fact just today, I learned the joys of weeding the yard.

The yard has been weedy pretty much since I moved in. I'm not really a yard fanatic - my main measure is seeing how green it is. Other than that I don't pay too much attention. But it's been getting more and more weedy all summer, and Wendy started bugging me about it, so today I finally went and weeded the yard.

Now, I've got a tiny yard. It's maybe 250 sq. feet, tops, which is about right for me. So I figured it would take maybe an hour, tops. Boy was I wrong. It turned out that large sections of the yard that I thought were grass were actually shot through with weeds. A couple entire areas turned out to be nothing but weeds, so I basically clearcut parts of the lawn. I ended up not even doing the entire thing because it got dark. All told I spent almost two hours and hauled out six buckets of weeds which made a pile about two feet tall. Think about that. A pile two feet tall, from a yard that's smaller than most people's living room. That's an unhealthy lawn.

But as usual the best part of the whole thing was the passersby. As I've previously commented, I've got some crazy neighbors. But apparently they only come out in the morning, at night the polite ones stop by. One older man stop to tell me I was doing good work, and he hadn't seen anyone weed that yard in years. Frankly, that was a relief to me. I thought I was the only crappy gardener out there, but evidently not!

But later a younger, black man stopped by for a moment. After looking over my handiwork for a moment, the conversation proceeded thusly:

Him: You sure got your work cut out for you.
Me: Yep, there's more weeds than grass in this yard.
Him: I been walking by here for 20 years and this is the best this yard has looked.
Me: Hey, thanks!
Him: Yep, if anyone walks on this yard now, you oughta be like "Hey nigger, get yo' ass off my yard!"
Me: Um... right. I'll do that.

Ah good times. Why do people want to live in the suburbs again?