mowing – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

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.

10247457_10152353417968926_7517047325752612395_n Unless you have spent a lot of time wandering through my archives or you’ve been here since very close to the beginning of the blog, you probably have not seen this post yet. It’s a shame, because it’s one of my favorites; go take a look if you like. And while you’re reading, note the part about the milkweed.

The fucking milkweed still isn’t dead.

However.

It’s gorgeous out tonight; it was crazy-humid all day but it’s cooled into a perfect evening. The boy wanted to play outside so I went out with him and my wife and randomly decided it was time to mow. This makes today the first day of summer, by the way; not only did I mow the front lawn for the first time in 2014 but I dodged the first couple dozen Deathwishes of the summer.

(There are ten thousand toads living in my yard. They are all named Deathwish on account of their constant insistence on hopping underneath my mower. I used to be careful about nudging them out of the way or mowing around them and then I realized that in three years of mowing I have never once managed to accidentally murder a toad with my lawnmower, which means that they can burrow or hang on or something like that, so I don’t bother dodging them any more.)

Anyway, yeah, I mowed. And I did something else tonight: I took another step toward unwelcome adulthood and spent good money on my lawn. It’s official; my lawn-zany neighbor has won. We hired Trugreen tonight. I was already strangely excited about it, which hurts me in my soul. But I am sick of hating my lawn and supposedly they help with that sort of thing.

Then I mentioned the milkweed. And the salesman dude (Oh. There was a salesman dude. He came by yesterday while the boy was taking his bath and came back again tonight at my request while I was mowing.) told me that they have some sort of liquid death that they will put on the milkweed and the milkweed will die in horrible pain. As will all living things under the circle they put the stuff on, straight down to the center of the earth.

Which is worth the summer’s $277 fee all the fuck by itself.

I am sooooo looking forward to this.