boxofdelights | all the instructions are on the card

Here is a fun game! Trim all the grass and weeds in your chaotic, overstuffed, overgrown front garden to under six inches tall. You have until 5:00 p.m. tomorrow. If you fail, the city will mow down your whole garden at your expense. If you succeed, nothing happens... and eventually you figure out that the threat is over.

Okay, but how do I figure out which of my plants the city counts as a weed?

All the instructions are on the card. I.e., if your garden gets mowed down, that was a weed.

Somehow I always end up playing this game after I go to Wiscon. The three years I didn't travel there, I don't think I did anything different here, but I didn't get a ticket. Maybe the city code compliance just didn't have enough employees those years.

This year the game is extra fun because my little old dog has diarrhea, and his wobbliness means I have to carry him down the steps when he needs to go out. After four days of sitting on the Madison Concourse's terrible chairs, all the lifting and carrying, and cleaning up after, and weeding and trimming has really fucked up my back.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Argh!

Also: longer lawns are better for butterflies and other pollinators; and for birds

*shakes fist at the city*

How horrible, I'm so sorry.

My city used to be, not that bad, but very very fussed about weeds or grass more than six inches high, and they would date their stupid letters way before they actually sent them, so that it looked as if they'd given you a lot of time, but they had really not.

You could have a prairie boulevard or native plants and grasses in a plot, but you had to follow a bunch of arcane rules. They suddenly just gave up all that, I think because the rusty-patched bumblebee was discovered to be surviving mostly in urban and to a lesser extent suburban yards and gardens. Then they went wild and, after pretending they didn't see people observing No Mow May, actually broke down and encouraged it.

Their authoritarian tendencies have all been channelled into harassing people about snow and ice on the sidewalk -- which is an actual problem, though their handling of it is very stupid.

I hope your authoritarians come to their senses about weeds.

P.

P.S. And WOW do I remember those chairs at Wiscon. Owie.