Something I’ve never gotten used to is how nice clothes wear out.
Yes, I know, that makes no sense. But it’s true anyway. I’ll buy a good quality shirt, thinking I’ve invested in something to last me, oh, I don’t know, twenty years or so, and then, after only a year or two I’ll see that the end of the sleeves are worn through and all full of loose threads.
Super annoying for two reasons. First of all, as I just admitted, I implicitly assume clothes will last roughly forever so this is an affront to permanence. But even more than that - it’s the end of the sleeves that fail? That’s all? The whole shirt is fine, except maybe for the grungy ring around the collar and a few small holes and maybe a stain or two … yet it’s actually rendered “worn out” by such a localized and minor failure?
Shirts should be designed better! Reinforced sleeves that resist the onslaught of time. Or replaceable sleeves! That would work, right? Just take off the worn cuff and swap in a new one. Like changing the razor blade in a box cutter.
Maybe the solution is to avoid long sleeves. It’s gotta be the fact that the cuff ends are way down there with your hands, which are always doing all sorts of work. If I only wore short sleeves this wouldn’t be an issue AT ALL!
The only downside would be my arms would get cold in the winter. Solution - my previously mentioned brainstorm - replaceable sleeve arms!
Hey, this might be Shark Tank worthy. If the sleeves are replaceable they could have different colors and patterns. Style! Think of the combinations. Maybe you’re feeling politically middle of the road so you could attach a red left sleeve and a blue right sleeve to signal your lack of tribalism to the watching world.
Clearly a sure fire, can’t miss money making idea. If you decide to pursue it please remember to tithe me 10 percent of the profits, I think that’d be fair.
And as I type here in my dark studio, I hear the hugely welcome sounds of raindrops ping panging upon my studio window. WHY are they welcome, you may ask, given that we’ve been inundated with water lately? Well, I’ll tell you.
Since moving to New Hampshire I’ve had to relearn all about the concept of “lawn”.
As a kid I knew “lawn” as green stuff to run around on and semi-regularly stain the knees of my jeans with. Oh, and I knew it supported clover, which was a fun weed to play with. But that was about the extent of my awareness.
Fast forward a few years and I was a newly minted professor and the happy inhabitant of a house deep in the Georgia outback. A house that had been slapped onto the Georgia mud and given a one season coating of quickie-lawn by the builder.
This introduced me to obnoxious gas powered Toro lawnmowers and through continual usage assured me that it was an acquaintance I wasn’t loving.
Happily, after a five year penance in the Peach State, I was compelled to travel. Go West, young man! All the way to California. And once there, after purchasing our tiny house on a quarter of an acre, I sent my lovely wife back to NJ to visit with her family, rolled up my sleeves (I hadn’t come up with the notion of removable sleeves yet) and said “BEGONE!”
Motivated by my deeply felt antipathy to mowing that had been well honed in Georgia, I decided that the best way forward in California, where it’s sunny and warm 24/7 (sarcasm alert - the rain was torrential for my first few years), would be to remove every single blade of grass from my property. Along with every razor edged agave, poorly placed dogwood, overgrown flowering vine, seed pod dropping sycamore (known to the cognoscenti as “junk tree”, and … well, you get the idea. The prior owners had embraced the landscaping approach known to horticultural scientists as “scatter ill-chosen crap everywhere and then let it all overgrow”. Here, let me show you a picture:
That’s pretty much what it was like. More or less.
What to do with the trees? Meet my friend, Mr. Stihl Chainsaw. All the rest of the photosynthesis gang? Introduce them to Miss Crowbar, Mark Mattock and Mrs Shirley Shovel.
After chucking all the vegetative detritus into my neighbor’s back yard, I arranged for several cubic yards of compost, loam and crushed lava rock to be unloaded into the driveway, rented a small Ditch Witch and with the help of it and Shirley’s brother Ben BIG Shovel I amended the crummy adobe clay that my home was perched upon with material that would support “nice” plantings. Totally changed the soil and made it amenable for a better class of plants. You know, the posh ones. Quite upper crust.
Then I threw in some more gas, fired up the little Witch and dug a whole heaping helping of trenches. All dug down a solid 12 inches down to avoid freezes (not going to fool an East Coast boy on freezes!). Next, a five station schedule 40 PVC piped water system with a multitude of drip and sprayer attachments. And thanks to multiple back and forth trips to the stone yard and a eager to please VW GTI hatchback, I transported an array of large lava boulders into my backyard and proceeded to artfully place them around a soil mound surrounded by black river rocks to form the basis of a Turtle Island within a small Japanese garden.
I planted a black pine (Pinus thunbergii for the win!) that I planned to train over time into the desired form, got a few more trees (carefully researched to not overgrow the size of the yard), planted them with care and love, and finally decided it was time to collapse on the floor with a completely destroyed back from doing all that work over the space of a single week all during a record breaking heat wave.
Because my motto is - never just do something if you can overdo it!
A few days later my wife returned from NJ and helped get me up from the floor, so that was nice. And for years and years we enjoyed the benefits of a water-smart garden in which every plant had its place and not a blade of grass was ever seen. I sold my mower and forgot about even the concept of “mowing”.
Until I moved to New Hampshire, natch.
Total property under my supervision? 1.73 acres. Percentage covered with insistently growing grass? 95%.
Okay, I jest. It’s only 91%.
Let’s just say there’s a lot of grass. And so I’ve gone from dealing with zero blades per year for the last few decades to roughly a billion. That’s a lotta blades.
I had no idea when I entered this new universe that I’d be plunged into an immediate series of ethical dilemmas. Should I join the Green Grass By Any Means party, whose goal is a living analogue to astroturf - an unbroken undulating sea of the green green grass of home and weeds needn’t apply? Or the Let Nature Rein brigade, turning my acreage into an oasis of natural wildflowers that feed and support the turgid and throbbing tapestry of life?
Or perhaps adopt my neighbor’s philosophy: “Eh, whatever.”
Do I fertilize? If so, how? With what? Nasty chemicals or piously pure organic stuff, coaxed from he bosom of Mother Earth with tenderness and care.?
And what about all those furry critters who are creating a huge subterranean complex of tunnels beneath the surface, the entrances to which are making my lawn appear like a small scale golf course. All I need is to plant little marker flags in the myriad of holes and I can charge the neighbors $5 to play a round.
What about mowing? Leave the cut crass to decompose (eventually) or bag it all up and make my own compost?
Well, I’m undoubtedly going to trigger some of you by saying that after a few years getting acclimated I’ve decided that my approach will be to use the soft touch natural approach AFTER I bring the yard into some sort of order. And so I dutifully bought a big old bag of Jonathan Green Crabgrass Preventer plus Fertilizer. Knock back the crabgrass which had made serious inroads last year and get the grass all fed for spring. Sounds like a plan, right?
Oh ho! Of course not! Because, to make my life easy, I placed this bag in my garage, not in my shed (easy unload from the car, right?).
Just to be clear, I ALSO held a desire to knock out all the broad leaf weeds and thus had purchased a big old bag of Jonathan Green Weed and Feed last Fall. Which was sitting in the shed.
Having two “and Feed” bags of weed control caused me pause, enough to send a query to Jonathan Green. Seemed to me that overfeeding the lawn, the one with bazillions of blades of grass, might be a bad thing. And they agreed! So off to my local plant place to see if I could exchange the bag of Weed and Feed for a regular old Weed. No feed.
Cue in-depth discussion with Dave, knowledgable plant guru. Just to be clear, he asked - “The crabgrass inhibitor you’ve got - it’s the one in the blue bag, right? And the Weed and Feed is this one in the bright yellow bag, yes?”
Indeed it was, I agreed.
“Well, no problem. Just use your Crabgrass mix now and then four weeks from now use the Weed and Feed. The Crabgrass stuff will stop any weed seeds from sprouting and in four weeks your grass will appreciate another slug of nutrition from the Weed and Feed.”
Ah ha! The plan was set.
And so, on the appointed day, I went to the shed, not the garage. And I looked at the bright yellow bag clearly labeled Weed and Feed and deftly opened it. I even cut off the end and noted how very yellow it was. Poured it all into my spreader and proceeded to spread it over my lawn, a warm feeling of accomplishment filling me. And then I watered it in liberally.
However a day later I was still bothered by the fact that I hadn’t needed to use all of it and that there was still five pounds or so left. But look! The weather was calling for a light rain the next day. Let’s spread the rest right now!
It was at this point that my creaking brain whispered “Hey, remember when you cut the bag open a couple of days ago? I’m pretty sure I recall the piece you cut off being bright yellow, not blue.”
“Nonsense,” I said to my brain. How could that be?
“And you know what else?”, my brain continued with a sardonic grin. “I distinctly recall you getting the bag from the shed, not the garage. Which would mean you didn’t actually put down the Crabgrass Preventer at all, wouldn’t it? Cause that’s where you put it - the garage.”
Okay, my brain had gotten me worried now. The ONLY time you can apply Crabgrass Preventer is in a narrow window after the soil temps had reached 50 degrees. I’d been monitoring soil tamps and that’s why I did the spreading when I did. There were only a few days left in which it could be put down before I’d have to wait an entire year.
And so I went to the garage, hoping to not find the full bag of Crabgrass Inhibitor smiling at me from where I’d put it originally.
Damn. Don’t you hate it when your brain is right?
And so, by dint of total doofusness, I’d bought myself a dilemma. Do I put down the Crabgrass Inhibitor immediately, thus catching the climatic window, but thereby double fertilizing and dooming myself to a Herculean task of mowing in the weeks to come? Or shrug my shoulders, vow to be less stupid next year, and just forget it?
Well, of course you know I couldn’t just forget it, right? So out came the spreader, in went the Crabgrass Inhibitor (with Feed!) and onto the lawn it went.
Will it overfertilize and burn my lawn? Will the lawn, now supercharged, overcome my feeble abilities to keep it in control? Will the chipmunks gain super powers from the combined chemicals and plot to overthrown the world? Tune in later for the answer to these and other heart-stopping, thrill-filled questions.
Questions like … do you know the proper way to open a container of aluminum (or aluminium if you’re of a UK persuasion) foil? Are you sure …?
Well, just in case you don’t, I’ll end today’s letter with a short and helpful tutorial that may just possibly make your life slightly (but measurably) better!
Here’s what a box of aluminum foil looks like:
And if you look at the end of the box you’ll see this:
But wait, what’s that I see? A circular groove as indicated below:
This is not random! The point of it is for you, the knowledgable consumer, to push the cardboard inward, like so:
Then you repeat on the opposite side, naturally. And in so doing you’ve created a quick and easy pseudo-axle for the roll of foil. A guide that keeps the foil in its place and turning smoothly as you pull.
Also, don’t neglect the handy “place the end of the cover here” spot:
So tell me, was this new to any of you? If it was, are you super stoked to try it? Be honest!
And now … some Nicky!
Nickyitis
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Firmware cartoon a classic. Please do a special tech cartoon edition some time!
I don’t use fertilizer or weed control and mow the lawn with a quiet mower that has rechargeable batteries. No more gasoline smell in my garage!