Improving Mother Nature

Today, for the first day of The Week of Tim (TWoT), Tim's annual week off designed to get the maximum vacation for a minimum expenditure of vacation days (thus it tends to occur the week of Thanksgiving) we trucked up to my parent's house and raked, mulched, and bagged their leaves. The annual leaf fiasco is something that constantly makes me realize that homeowner's associations exist for the sole purpose of making your life miserable.

See...for centuries, leaves have been falling off trees every year, laying on the ground and getting walked on, ground up, blowing about, etc....and the world has not ended. In fact, there are still happy places in the world (like National parks) where leaves fall off trees and people go there specifically to walk around on that carpet of leaves...the same carpet of leaves they could have in their own backyard if they just left well enough alone.

But no. The modern HOA has determined that people must surround their houses with grass. And grass is not happy with nature's ground covering. So you must get rid of the leaves so that your grass can grow and be happy. In bygone days, this has relied on rakes and lots of backbreaking effort. There is still some amount of both required, but happily today we were able to make use of two of the best inventions of the modern era: the riding lawnmower and the leaf blower.

You probably don't need a grueling blow-by-blow (pun not really intended), but sufficent to say, all the leaves have been wrangled happily into bags and dropped on the curb for the trashman. The grass can now breathe free.

And my arm may stop vibrating by tomorrow. If I'm lucky.