Lawn care is dumb and unnecessary.

Oh good. The mowing crews are here for the houses on either side of mine, so I get to spend my day listening to leaf blowers and riding mowers in stereo. I guess maybe it is better that they are both happening at the same time so that it’s over and done with quickly, if somewhat worse while it’s happening than if they were each done at different times.

And either way, it is an improvement over the guy who used to live in one of the houses. He was retired and mowed the yard himself. He often did it twice a week, each time spending four to five hours on it.

The whole lawn care thing seems weird and wasteful. It’s not like I let my yard turn into Dave Spivey’s house, but the amount of effort and expense that people put into keeping pristine lawns—either doing it themselves or paying someone else to do it—is bananas.

I think the situation is made worse when people outsource the work to a service. There is the expectation that the job will be professionally done, and so the work that is perceived to be necessary gets ratcheted up. It’s not enough that the grass gets mowed—we can’t have any grass clippings left around, either, so out come the leaf blowers, and they run those until every last bit of grass is blown out into the street. There is no need for any of this—just mow the damn grass¹ and be done with it—and yet groundskeeping crews show up every day all up and down the block as though the whole thing were a big corporate campus.