On suburban splendor

On November 8, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life5 Comments

I just mowed our front lawn, for what I suspect will be the last time this year (note for the record, that’s not our house up there) and after finishing the job I texted my wife to come outside and look at it.

“We have lived in this house for ten years,” I said, “and this is the best the lawn has ever looked. Right now at this exact second.”

Y’all know this about me if you’ve been around here for a minute; I hate yard work. I hate it. When we bought this house there was a foot of snow on the lawn and on the roof and had we looked at it in the summer when I’d have had a moment to realize what I was getting us into I would have argued against buying the place. The couple that owned the house before us were elderly and retired and they clearly had channeled all of their leisure time into the landscaping and the lawn, much like one of our neighbors still does (our other neighbors keep their front lawn putting-green short, which is a whole different, slightly weird vibe) and we are clearly the No Fucks to Give house in the neighborhood.

Anyway, this year– and not for the first time!– we shelled out some money for a lawn company to handle things like fertilization and reseeding for us. We have done this in the past with another company to no real result, and figured it was worth one more shot with another company this year, and … man. I gotta admit it, as much as I hate this shit it’s nice to look at a lawn after it’s been mowed and you can see the lines and everything is nice and clean and even. And there aren’t any super-thin patches and that damn fairy ring is gone and no weeds. Hell, there weren’t even any leaves, since raking happened this weekend(*) and I mowed up everything that fell since then.

Anyway, if you’re local, and you don’t have the patience to deal with your lawn’s bullshit yourself, you could do a lot worse than hiring Lawn Doctor.

(*) by which I mean my wife raked the front lawn. Isn’t passive voice awesome? I bet you thought I had something to do with it.

In which I still hate nature

On June 28, 2019June 28, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

I’m still holding true to one of my summertime goals: every day, do something to clean and/or organize and/or improve something around the house. Frankly, most days I’m doing multiple things, but even on the laziest of days I’m trying to get something minor accomplished. To wit: there is a bush in front of our house, and there were a bunch of big weeds and two actual small trees growing out of the bush that needed to come out. I initially posted a picture of one of the weeds to Facebook, because it reminded me of something that the back of my head was telling me was poisonous and I wanted to know if anyone could identify it. (The poisonous things are hemlock and giant hogweed, which are both superficially similar; I do not think this weed is poisonous any longer.)

Several hours later, I still don’t know what the hell the thing is and now it’s a blog post. We’re all about plants around here today.

Anyway. First picture: I pulled the thing out of the ground barehanded and with very little effort, so the roots don’t go deep. I tossed it on the hood of my car for scale. This was not here last week, so it grows fast.

A close-up on the flowers. Note lots of tiny clusters of white flowers but no stamens (stama?) anywhere. This is relevant, as lots of plants have the flowers but they have stamens all over the place.

The underside of the flowers:

And the leaves:

I took another picture that was a close-up of the stems, but you get a good look in the lower corner of that picture. The two most common guesses have been mock bishop’s weed and Queen Anne’s lace. I feel like neither is right. Mock bishop’s weed has really needly leaves:

And Queen Anne’s lace leaves don’t look right either, although they’re a lot closer, and I keep seeing QAL described as “hairy”:

… which, shit, maybe this IS hemlock. The stems and leaves look right, but the flowers really don’t. This is hemlock:

No little stamen thingies on the flowers, so not hemlock. And, interesting: I just scrolled back up to look at the pictures of the flowers more carefully and the stems by the flowers are a little hairy. So maybe it’s Queen Anne’s after all?

EDIT: Found a website about QAL and hemlock and now I don’t think it’s either, because the stems don’t have any purple in them (which hemlock does) and the flowers don’t have any purple spots in them or any bracts, which Queen Anne’s Lace does. So I think it’s another thing altogether.

Gah. Screw nature; it’s stupid.

Must be July

On July 6, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography2 Comments

I love how tight a schedule these things are on.

Good morning!

On July 14, 2014July 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography5 Comments

I’ve got to take the cat to the vet and who knows what kind of drama that’s going to create, so have a few more backyard flower pictures for the time being:

Question for the lawn care enthusiasts

On July 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized17 Comments

What’s the deal with the rings? Do I have faeries? Should I never walk into them at midnight?

Not a good sign

On May 26, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

About to go outside and mow, and I just tried to put a pair of shorts on. I was already wearing shorts.

In which I make a thing

On May 25, 2014May 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Writing3 Comments

When I got up this morning that planter box was a small pile of lumber in my garage and the 450 pounds of dirt inside of it were in my car in the driveway, so I figure I’ve accomplished all necessary Grown Up Shit for the weekend. Note the post hole digger in the background; the posts in the corners are six inches deep in the ground, so the box ain’t going nowhere nohow. (Also note that one two cubic foot bag of soil claims to weigh 40 pounds. This is bullshit; maybe if it’s completely bone dry, and this soil was very definitely not bone dry. I’m estimating 75 lbs. per bag based on being too lazy to just weigh the shit and feeling like the internet’s estimate of 12o lbs. is insanely high.)

Anyway, point is, soon there will be tomatoes growing in here. I like tomatoes. They’re tasty. And that, shit, I still have to mow, so I guess I’m not done with Grown Up Shit after all. God, I hate outside.

I made Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 free again yesterday and didn’t tell anybody. This was an experiment; I wanted to get some idea of how many sales/downloads I would get absent my own promotional efforts, if I just let Amazon and the whims of the Internet determine how many copies moved. There’s probably some interference happening from the day of the week, although I’m not sure whether Amazon would be busier on a Wednesday than a Saturday. (I am less likely to order from Amazon on the weekend because Sundays add an extra day for stuff to get to me; I don’t know if other people think like I do. The Internet seems to think that Wednesday is slower than Saturday.)

Anyway, point is: there were 84 downloads on the free day earlier this week, which I hyped heavily and repeatedly on every online venue I had available to me. Yesterday, with literally no promotion whatsoever, there were 21 downloads– all of which, presumably, were to people unknown to me, since unless someone from the blog or from Twitter or whatever just happened to click through and notice it, there’s no reason for anyone to have known about it.

This tells me that Amazon is not going to help me very much with promotion. This also tells me that I’m probably going to have to invest in some sort of paid advertising if I want sales/downloads to grow beyond the people I have immediate access to– because the first 100 or so copies downloaded (free or otherwise) appear to have gone almost entirely to people either from the blog or from my actual life, which means that my supply of additional humans who I know that might download my book is probably dwindling. The next time I do this I’ll keep it free for a couple of days and see what happens on day #2 of the promotion. Don’t hold your breath, though; I’m likely not going to make it free again until I make back what I paid for the cover, which will take a couple more sales if I don’t pay attention to the fact that I have to pay taxes and maybe another ten if I do.

I feel like there was one more thing I wanted to blog about today, so there may be yet another post later tonight. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.