It's Getting Reel

Housewarming gift (garden warming?)
from a friend. I love it.

Since I completely abandoned theme days a couple months back, it's totally okay for me to blog about green living-ish things on a Saturday, yes? Of course it is.

So, we moved house (yes, again) at the end of April, and this time we're in a proper house. With a yard. I haven't lived in a proper house since I was 21, y'all. And while we could have paid someone else to continue maintaining our yard, I wasn't down with that and decided to do it myself, because...

I chased this guy around the tree
to get his picture! He was not impressed.

... I've dreamed for years of owning one of those reel push mowers. No gasoline, no motor, just my own calories being burned to cut the grass to reasonable levels. Unfortunately, between me finishing grad school, both Denise and me trying to unpack, and the relentless rain we've been having in Central Texas, we've only managed to cut the grass once since owning the mower. And that was Denise who mowed (Denise who has never dreamed about owning a push mower, but as with so many other things, has been swept along in this particular adventure whether she wanted to be or not. It's dangerous being my sister), because I was writing papers and stuff.

Any ideas what these are? Can I
put them on my cereal without any
ill effects?

This morning, after we managed to go about 24 hours without any new rain, I decided the grass was as dry as it was likely to get and hauled the mower out to make my yard look less like a tropical rainforest in the making. I gotta tell you, someone along the way has made some curious landscaping choices in this yard, including a line of rocks through the middle--whatever the rock line used to contain is long gone, so now I just have this weird set of rocks that make it really hard to mow the middle.

And there are sticks. Lots and lots of sticks. Reel mowers don't do well with sticks, as both Denise and I have discovered.

And there's a tree in front of the house that has dropped a few small branches into the flowerbed that lines the front, and I guess no one ever went in after them until today, when I dragged them out.

Does it look better? Probably not. I doubt anyone will be featuring this house on Curb Appeal any time soon.

Who else is doing yard work this weekend?