Seriously, Where Was I? Part I
As I stated in my previous post, I've been away. Not just from the blog, but actually away on vacation. I'll get to the vacation bit in a later post, but I just thought I'd fill you in on what else is going on in my exciting life. It's not all jet-setting, caviar, champagne, and the mile-high club. In fact, and I know this will come as a shock to most of you, it's not any of those things (well, maybe it's a couple of those things). In actuality, my life has once again been consumed by yardwork.
Now, yardwork is one of those things that most of us do at some point in our lives. Even those of us who don't currently live in a house probably mowed the yard or did some raking growing up. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. But something funny has happened to me and the other guys I know who own houses: when we get together we talk about our yards. What is going on? Can you imagine anything more boring to talk about? I'm sure that you could if you really tried, but it's got to rank pretty high on the list of boring conversation topics. In fact, I can't believe I'm writing about it, much less that you're actually reading this!
And you know what makes it worse? We really get into it when when we're talking about. It's almost like war vets getting together and swapping stories. Spending almost obscene amounts of money on getting your lawn to look halfway decent become battle scars and badges of honor. It's gotten to the point that we talk about it when we should be having fun! The most egregious example of this has to be Josh's bachelor party. A group of us went to the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs to celebrate Josh and Katie's upcoming nuptials and guess what we did? If you guessed act like drunken buffoons and howl at women, well, you'd at least have guessed what we were expected to be doing. Instead, we talked about aerating and overseeding! Now, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's definitely something I would never have seen myself doing even a year ago. I'm sure that to a septuagenarian that's a wild night out, but for a twentysomething, it's a bit hard to fathom. And that's not to say that Josh's party wasn't fun, it was a great time, but I'm just saying if you read a transcript of our discussion, you would have thought it was from a bridge club, not a bachelor party.
I'm not going to bore you any further by going into any great detail about what I've yardwork I've been doing, just that it involves aerating and overseeding. It's definitely something that needed to be done, but it's not actually something that needed to be done by me. You see, right now I have a contract with TrueGreen Chemlawn and they offer an aeration/overseeding service for just under $200. That sounded a little pricey, and with Megan and I go going on vacation, I thought I'd save us some money and do it myself. Didn't quite work out that way. No, I actually ended up spending more money by trying to do it myself. This is starting to become a pattern (Anyone remember when I tried to fix the toilet? After going through all of this with the toilet, I tried to fix it and then had to go through this). I'm beginning to think I'm a living Mastercard ad:
Aerating: $40
Seed: $130
Fertilizer: $50
Paying TrueGreen to do all of that for you for less money and so that you don't have to be out working in the yard so you could actually be crossing off one of the other ten million things from your to-do list? Priceless.
There are some things money can't buy, for everything else, there's Mastercard.
Okay, the "Priceless" part gets a bit wordy, but you get the point. The less of this crap I have to do the better, and if someone's out there that can do it cheaper, all the better. Oh, and next time you hear me talking about some home improvement project I'm about to undertake, do whatever is in your power to stop me. Remind me that I'm not in the least bit "handy," and that having someone else do it is probably a good idea. I'll thank you for it later.
Now, if I've just bored you to tears or if you have no idea what I'm talking about, that's a good thing. You're one of the lucky ones, because once you buy a house, and start having to maintain it, there's no turning back. There's no turning back and you become the very thing you swore you never would: your parents. Who needs Halloween? That's scary enough to keep me up at night...
posted by Christian at 2:20 PM
3 Comments:
When I was 16, I wanted to talk about yardwork, but no one else really worked on their folks' lawn.
I should have gotten into lawn care...
FYI - I spent about $80 on aeration and overseeding materials. This could be cheaper because my lawn is smaller, but I didn't think it was that much smaller.
Yeah, my mom was suprised at how much I spent on seed, too. I don't know, seeds expensive but maybe I put too much down. I followed the instructions on the bag for my spreader, only did one pass, and still went through four bags! We'll see how well all this worked in the spring, but I may even just skip it next year.
And as far as wanting to talk about your lawn when you were 16, well, we've always said you were a 60-year-old man trapped in a young man's body. Unfortunately, it seems I'm not far behind.
You got ripped if you paid that much. I just got my yard aerated for $40.00, sprinkler winterized for $40.00, and bought 4 pounds of seed at Mulhuls for $3.99/lb.
I like you was going to go with my lawn company but found they were twice as expensive as calling one of those guys who puts there rickity old signs up on the telephone pole. I used them for both the aeration and sprinkler winterization and found the event to be rather pleasent. Instead of waiting weeks for the lawn company to come over they were there within 3 days.
I am not sure how you spent so much on seed unless they have found a way to make gold grow like corn, I think that they saw a sucker coming. O well just one of those lessons you learn during your first year of home ownership. Hey I got to run my doorbell just rang and I think it is the furnace guy here to tell me that my furnace is fine and to make sure I change the fiter each month. Wonder what that is going to cost me???
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