Yard Tales

Today I am happy because the magical yard debris pick up truck came and picked up the yard debris we have accumulated since we moved here. (pictured above) You see it all started about a month ago when we moved into a house with a big yard. We have never lived in a house - never had to take care of a yard - never owned a lawn mower. So my husband goes out and gets a re-conditioned lawn mower from Home Depot and I take pictures of him mowing (see above) and it is a grand and memorable event for about 3 minutes until we realize that after one pass of our lawn he has to empty the bag of grass clippings so if he continued on this path of emptying the bag every pass it would probably take him anywhere between 1-2 WEEKS to finish mowing the lawn once with all the mowing and emptying since our yard is pretty big. So after trying a few things to rig it so it wouldn't take us a month to mow - he eventually just lets the cut grass fly out the back without the bag on. Then he would go and rake up the grass taking him double the time. We would ask people's advice, we would stop the car and watch how other people mowed their lawn. We questioned buying a riding lawn mower - or a different type etc.. we just couldn't imagine that mowing a lawn would be that much work. So he ended up mowing the lawn twice using this method which left us with bags and bags of grass clippings we didn't know what to do with. We tried bagging them up in plastic bags and putting them out with the normal trash pick up- no luck they wouldn't take them. Gratefully, our neighbor told us about a yard debris truck that comes by every other Monday to pick up grass clippings and the sort but the stuff could not be in plastic bags. So we had to go buy huge paper bags from Lowe's and transfer all the wet and moldy grass clippings to these paper bags still worrying that they would take one sniff and not take them and we would still be stuck with 7 bags of moldy grass clippings (all of this taking days to figure out by the way). Not to mention we also had to trim a lot of our trees and bushes so we had about a dozen bushels of tree limbs they needed to take as well that we had to hand bundle and could not be longer than 5 feet. I guess this place hadn't been taken core of by the last tenants very well. SO, we spent all day Saturday with our tree limbs and moldy stinky grass and then a smile spread across my face today as I saw the truck come and them load up every last twig.

That my friends would put anybody in a good mood. Before you think that we will have to go through this every time he mows the lawn take comfort in the fact that we finally read our instruction manual for the lawn mower and realized there is a "mulch" setting that cuts the grass in to tiny little pieces and puts it back into the lawn without having to bag it.  We learn line upon line at this house.

My tale ends with  meeting our very first family pet in the tree out front as I was raking out the cobwebs from our tree out falls a pretty big snake. I yelled - the kids ran away and it slithered away somewhere we didn't see while I was waiting for JD to get something to kill it with - how do you deal with a snake? Well good thing it slithered away before we had to decide how to deal with it - but as I said in my last post - we have named it Gomer. Gomer the snake. At that is the end of our yard tale.