lawn work – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

The Marjan Kamali book I finished last night and the Julia Alvarez book my kids are reading for summer school are overlapping in some really interesting ways, but I want to finish the Alvarez book before I talk about either of them too much. Meanwhile I am sitting at my desk absolutely enthralled by this, which I just found out about on Bluesky and sought out immediately. I am hungry; all I’ve eaten all day is a couple of doughnuts and a turkey wrap, so maybe dinner would be a good idea, but I’m currently putting off food in favor of music. It’s that good.

The World Cup started today; the first match was apparently at 3:30. I initially planned on watching it but then didn’t in favor of mowing my front lawn in blazing heat, which tells you just how committed I am to following the World Cup. I don’t think I’ve ever not done anything in favor of mowing instead. But my front lawn is now mowed, and I’m no longer paranoid that my neighbors secretly hate me.

My back yard, meanwhile, is going to suddenly catch fire in the next couple of days and burn to a crisp and then I won’t have to worry about it or its ten-foot, carnivorous, mobile weeds any longer. Nobody can really see the back yard. I’m pretending it’s a nature preserve. There’s probably some insects in there somewhere, assuming the weeds haven’t eaten them.

In case you can’t tell, I don’t have anything staggeringly important going on at the moment. I had nine kids today, the most of them I’ve had, and they seem to be enjoying themselves well enough so I don’t think we’re going to drop down to four again anytime soon. The one I know from last year still hasn’t shown up, though, which is kind of disappointing. I’m doing a decent job acquitting myself as an LA teacher; some parts of my brain that I haven’t had to use in a long time are coming back online, which is fun. I was hoping for a decent change of pace with this job, and I’ve got it in a couple of different ways, and I’ll be even happier with the whole situation next week, when that first paycheck shows up.

What do y’all have going on tonight?

_{Pictured: not my pile of branches. I didn’t get a picture for some reason.}

I made a terrible mistake today and did some yard work on purpose. We have a large tree in the front yard whose branches hang too low, so that if you’re mowing or whatever they need to be moved out of the way to take care of the part of the yard under the tree. I was all ready to post something on Twitter or whatever commenting on how it had turned out to be one of those jobs that you dread for forever and then takes like fifteen minutes when you actually do it, and then I discovered my neighbor standing behind me. I had headphones in, so this isn’t terribly surprising, mind you.

At any rate, I then got to have a lovely conversation about how too much of my tree was overhanging her yard and also overhanging the roof of her house. Now, this tree is really tall— I’m terrible at estimating distances, but it’s easily over twice as tall as my house, so obviously doing something like cutting a straight line along the property line wasn’t going to happen. I pointed out that we were having some folks out sometime soon to cut down the locust tree in the back yard and that I’d ask if they could hack this one back a bit on the taller branches, and that I’d take care of the stuff I could reach today.

And then it occurred to me that somehow the following had happened: one of my neighbors came over, complained about the state of my yard, demanded that I fix the state of my yard, and that somehow I not only did it but I’m not even mad about it. Like, that’s got to be a tricky conversation to have with somebody, right? I can see that going poorly. Were the situations reversed I’d have just asked if she minded if I cut the damn branches myself to avoid the chance of a confrontation going south and ending up on YouTube or some shit.

The problem here is that I’d already cut enough branches to fill our two allocated yard waste bins, so now there’s a giant pile of branches in front of my house the size of a car that are just going to have to sit there until what’s in the bins now gets taken away, and then I can cut them apart and fill the bins again. And frankly it’s not impossible that the process will have to be repeated twice. In the meantime, I’ve been sweaty and tired all afternoon and a lot more achy than I intended to be, because using a pole saw for an hour is tiring.

Also, I made sure that not one single inch of that pile of branches is on her yard. I’m considerate like that.