I'm "Watch the Grass Grow" Old

I am unhappy to report that I have found the surest sign of my aging, to date.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – there have been plenty of signs along this road. For instance, it’s been a long time since I could get on or off the couch without making some sort of groan, grunt, sigh, or popping sound.

I can’t tell the shampoo from the conditioner in a new shower, and I never think to inspect everything with my glasses on before I get in. If there is a third option for body wash, it’s all over. The Lord only knows what I washed and “shampooed” with that morning.

I keep Advil in most every room of the house and all the cars, I really can’t watch TV without the subtitles, and don’t even get me started on strange cars parking in front of my house!

Obviously, I’m getting old, but I wasn’t aware just how old until we got rid of our backyard play structure. A few months ago, a young couple with two little girls became the next caretakers of the behemoth wooden tower-o’-fun, and we were left with a large open area at one end of our backyard.

Many ideas about what to do with the space were brought up by my wife, all of which sounded either prohibitively expensive or prohibitively difficult. She finally agreed to my relatively simple suggestion of “lawn,” and so began my latest project.

Simple does not always mean easy, and I am not going to lie to you – digging trenches for the sprinklers to service the mere 540 square feet of new lawn almost did me in. Normally, digging sprinkler pipe trenches is not a big deal, if you live in a place that uses dirt for the ground.

Our neighborhood doesn’t use dirt. We use round, river rock cobblestones to hold up our houses here. You can’t dig in our neighborhood with a shovel. The shovel just makes a ping noise and stops dead on a rock the size of softball, two inches underground. That rock is surrounded by other rocks, ranging in size from golf ball to volleyball, which continue no matter how far you dig down with your pickaxe and digging bar.

The small spaces between the rocks are usually filled in with dirt, but in this case, they were mostly filled in with tree roots, since the whole 540 square feet of would-be lawn is under a massive tree of unknown species. (I have never known what any of our trees or bushes actually are, and I don’t care, as long as they don’t fall onto the house. So far, so good. I think the rocks hold them in place.)

I only needed to put in nine sprinkler heads, but the trenching ran me out of Advil in every room in the house and two of the cars. When I had recovered enough to stand up almost straight, and the new pipes were in the ground and buried, we brought in some beautiful new rock-free topsoil and leveled it all out.

I spread the new grass seed and raked it into the amazing new dirt ten days ago, and in those ten days I have found out how old I really am. I have probably inspected the new lawn area between 50 and 75 times since the seed went on. I have told people I don’t even know about my new grass sprouts that started to happen five days ago. The people I do know are now avoiding me, but I don’t care, because I’m in my backyard staring at my “lawn.”

When I was able to, I even got down on my hands and knees to inspect the little shoots and look across all of them at eye-level.

I had no idea the amount of joy I would get from seeing that one bare patch over there start to show some green yesterday.

I mean, what the hell?

This kind of thing sneaks up on you. One minute you’re skateboarding through life without a care in the world, and the next you’re mad that they rearranged the grocery store. It was fine the way it was.

But it wasn’t until this week that I realized I was “watch the grass grow” old.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go check and see if that middle section has filled in any since this morning. It’s warm today!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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We Possess Sprinklers

I noticed one of our clumps of decorative grass by our front walk was looking a little brownish the other day (read: completely dead-looking), and realized I hadn’t turned on the sprinkler system yet.

Spring has sprung, but I had been lulled into a state of non-sprinklering by the winter we just had here in Northern California, which can only be described as a six-month monsoon with slight pauses for drizzle.

So yesterday I flipped the sprinkler controls in the garage to “on,” and this morning they ran for the first time this year. About an hour after they were supposed to have been finished, I was out on the driveway and noticed the three sprinklers on the small lawn to the right of the driveway were still on and sending quite a bit of water down the street to the storm drain.

It was odd that they hadn’t shut off when they were supposed to, but what made it even more odd was the fact that they are tied in with about half the sprinklers across the driveway on the main lawn, and those were off. So one of my sprinkler valves came on but failed to turn off, but some of its sprinklers were off and some were on.

If you know anything at all about sprinkler valves and piping, you know that what I just described is impossible, without demonic sprinkler possession being in play.

I went to all five valves and turned them on and off manually. That did not solve the problem.

I went to the sprinkler controller in the garage and turned it off. They kept running. That should also be impossible.

OK, maybe the sprinkler controller has shorted internally, I thought to myself. So, I actually disconnected each and every valve control wire from their terminals. There was no longer any possible way the valve could be signaled to be on.

The sprinklers kept running.

It was at this point that I got down on my knees in my garage and prayed for God to exorcise the evil irrigation demon that had possessed my home. I prayed hard, because I had other things to do with my morning than battle the Demon of Irritrol, but the good Lord did not stop the raging waters.

He did, however, provide me with some clarity. As I prayed for the sake of my water bill and protection from the rath of the California Eternal Drought Coalition Forces, it finally occurred to me that if half the sprinklers on one valve weren’t on, then those sprinklers weren’t on that valve. The system is wired to appear and operate as if the sprinklers on both sides of the driveway are on one valve, but they couldn’t possibly be, demonic possession or not. Water just doesn’t work that way.

So somewhere underground, that control wire from terminal 2 is connected to another control wire that goes to another valve that controls my three rogue sprinklers, and at some point during the monsoon months, that valve got corroded enough that it no longer shuts off automatically.

Yay!

But where could that mystery valve be, you ask? It’s buried underground in the backyard in a valve box that was abandoned years ago when we put the pool in. I thought the valves in that box only controlled the backyard lawn sprinklers that were dug up by the pool excavator. I was obviously mistaken. At least one of them is pigtail-wired off Valve Number 2 to run three sprinklers next to my driveway that don’t shut off anymore.

Demonic possession officially ruled out. Thank you, Jesus?

So, after shutting off the water to the whole system to stop the flooding, I wrote myself a note to spend Saturday on an exploratory digging expedition.

It was my wife’s idea to have kids and buy a house. I wanted to live on a boat. Boats never have sprinkler issues, because you don’t need a pool.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

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Let's Pool our Natural Resources

Our grass in the back yard died a few years ago because of the drought, so we decided to do the only drought-friendly thing that made any sense. We put in a pool. Droughts are caused by not having enough water, so we put in a twenty thousand-gallon water reservoir in our yard. We’re doing our part, California. You’re welcome.

Our front yard grass died at the same time, so I wanted to help even more by putting in a bass pond, but my wife insists there are some zoning issues with that, or something. I think she just doesn’t want an eighteen-foot MasterCraft floating in her front yard. Women, huh?

Getting a pool is not for the faint of heart. Besides choosing which two of the three kids won’t go to college, you also have to endure an eight-week demolition experience, and be prepared to deal with the aftermath.

All pool builders follow the same simple three step process:

Step 1: Remove fence

Step 2: Completely destroy everything between the street and the far corner of the back yard.

Step 3: Fill new pool with water

It looks like an atomic bomb went off in the middle of our back yard, leaving a beautiful pool in the blast crater, and total destruction everywhere else. Our front yard looks like a bad day in Afghanistan.

Once the pool was complete and it was time to deal with the utter destruction of our property, we did the first thing anyone would do. We ignored it and threw a pool party. And then another one. And another. I don’t know how the rich and famous do it. I have been at a never-ending pool party for two and a half weeks now, and I’m exhausted. We filled the new pool with water on June 24^th, and since then the only time I have left the house was to get more beer, wine, and juice boxes.

Do I care that everything in my back yard besides the pool looks like the aftermath of a Vegas strip hotel demolition? Of course I don’t. I have a pool. Please ignore the rubble and enjoy yourselves, folks. Actually, it makes party cleanup quite a bit easier. Instead of picking things up, you can just sweep everything into the rubble pile the next morning and start over.

And it turns out the pool is convenient, also. Not only have none of us had to shower in the last two weeks (again, you’re welcome, California), but the boys have no more arguments for why staying home in the summer is boring. Every time one of them says anything about being bored, I just throw them in the pool. Many times while they’re still in their pajamas. Boredom problem solved, plus as a bonus, laundry done. The drought-friendliness of a pool never seems to end.

The pool can help in emergencies, too. Our Fourth of July party, for example, had a happy ending that could have easily been the other way around if not for the pool. When you accidentally light yourself on fire with an El Diablo fountain firework, a quick dip in the deep end is not only refreshing, but also eliminates a visit to the ER. California’s tax payers can thank me again in that situation, since we had to give up health insurance to afford the pool.

The bottom line is, I would highly recommend getting a pool, especially if you live in a dry area like we do. If we all do our part, we can not only eliminate our kids’ boredom complaints and prevent holiday-related injuries, but we might just be able to end this drought.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to ignore the annihilation of my landscaping some more and get ready for the pool party today.

Cheers!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

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