I can see clearly now

Our lawn is dead. This is not unexpected and not a sign of insufficient morality on our part; the problem is that while it rained heavily approximately 45 days in March, it didn't rained since then until this week, while the Sun has gone on shining at roughly 110 percent normal intensity. There are many side effects from this, such as an electricity bill which went over $16,000 for August to cover air conditioning (mind, I think my parents over-conditioned the air), but one of them is that the lawn has turned into crispy deep-fried grass flakes.

It's bad enough that the Homeowner's Association has gone sending snippy notices suggesting what might be done to correct the deplorable state of the lawns to people who didn't use the available water supply to keep their monocultural blights alive. My father --- who was briefly a Lawn Doctor franchisee back when those were just getting started --- did agree with the general idea that something ought to be planted before winter, so that there'd be a fresh lawn to die in next year's drought.

And so it was that he spent hours raking dead grass off the front lawn --- the spot where I've seen a young rabbit hanging about --- and cast one of his passive-aggressive ``in lieu of rent this month maybe when you're finished exercising you could do this chore'' things my direction. So I called his bluff and went out to rake dead grass up, to his disappointment since he was hoping I'd not do anything and he could sulk about that for weeks. I ended up raking the side lawn as well as the neighbor's lawn (the neighbor whose driveway I use for my car) and surprising my father what with how I correctly scraped up most of the dead grass.

Anyway, both lawns are now covered in mulch or peat or whatever it is you put on, as well as seeds, so that with the non-dead pre-existing grass they look like pictures of a dead lawn which were over-saturated in Photoshop. It's not actually a bad look, though I wonder what the rabbit makes of it.

Trivia: Lawn Doctor was started by Anthony Giordano, owner of Tony's Harris Hardware store in Matawan, New Jersey, in 1963. Source: The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, Virginia Scott Jenkins.

Currently Reading: 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C Clarke. Well, I had to read it sometime this year, didn't I?

[ David Letterman just said October is Squirrel Awareness Month, which I hadn't heard about. They need a Squirrel Awareness Month Awareness Week. They have an envelope from PO Box 324 in Oklahoma City, showing a squirrel in a Valentine heart and the letters T L C around it to establish that this is so a thing. ]