Silly Californians!

I really wish I'd started blogging about our move to Indiana a year ago, back when some of these funny things happened in real time. It's never as funny a year later, but whatever.

In San Diego, only the rich people have grass. The soil isn't really right for it (lots of clay and salt) and since it's hot and they import all their water from the Colorado River, it's really expensive to water the stuff.

Landscaping in San Diego is a nice mixture of cactus and rocks, for the most part.

In Indy - everyone has grass. There's tons of water. It grows like crazy! Lush and green and wonderful.

Last spring, we seeded the backyard at our rental house and watched as the pretty grass grew. And grew. And grew. We realized that we needed to mow. And to do that... you need a mower.

I figured we could probably get a used lawnmower on craiglist for cheap, and we found a guy who refurbishes them. I'd just recently read an article about lawnmower engines and how inefficent and polluting they are. When the guy said he had an electric mower, I was stoked! We bought it and headed home to mow the lawn.

Yeah.

First off, it didn't charge. You had to plug in an extension cord, which meant when you mowed you had to constantly worry about running over the cord.

As if that wasn't annoying enough, the mower only had an 18" deck. With 1/3 acre (and only 1700 sq ft of that house and deck), Aaron spent a few HOURS mowing the lawn.

He mowed twice. Then we paid a lawncare service for the rest of the summer.