About That Lawn...

Well, the problem with getting the lawn done was that I started painting my office. Which meant that all those jungle artifacts jamming the shelves and all that art, and the vitally important medicines I have on my desk and everything had to come down and get cleaned one by one. And let me tell you, when I got stuck by a blowgun dart with curare on it, even though it was just for a second, well, made me really sick. No fun.
    And then there were the headdresses where each feather needed to be cleaned. And then the buying of the paint and new rollers and drop clothes. Then cleaning the ceiling fan, then painting the ceiling, then the walls--painting was easy--and then the clean up and then getting everything back into place. The darned project took six days--in part because I was working on a cover story and only worked on the office for three or four hours a day. And when the cover story was done, I worked on a Drug War Follies column for Skunk. Then I got the room back together.
   By which time, the grass, which had been mowed during the several days before painting, had grown to nearly a foot high in a lot of places--we'd had a lot of rain during that week--making collecting it in the mower bag impossibly difficult. I did it that way, pushing the electric mower and emptying the bag about every 30 feet for the first 1/4 or so of an acre, then gave up and just cut it without the bag. Much easier, except that I had to rake it afterward. And I have already done enough raking in my lifetime. I don't like raking anymore. Still, I had to do that for one patch of maybe 5000 square feet and another of about 6,000 square feet. Royal pain in the neck. But now I'm down to just three or four more hours of mowing and another three or four hours of raking and then I will be done again. Which is good, because the grass I mowed just in front of my house on Friday--that's just four days ago--needs mowing again--and soon, if I'm going to be able to cut and bag it, rather than rake it.