Healing and Lawns
Aug. 12th, 2003 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liralenJet's none the worse for the wear, and we had a great time at the pool last night. We went to the "Pepperoni Bar", i.e. the Souper Salad! for dinner, and Jet ate a bunch of pepperoni with their smaller ("little fish!") goldfish-lookalikes before he refused all fruit and vegetables (even putting peas onto my plate when I tried to put a few on his) and headed for the ice cream machine. ("Creams!")
Jet's vocabulary has picked up, and his grammar's gone up a notch. He now says full phrases and sometimes even sentences.
On the home front, the lawn went in yesterday. It makes me squirm a bit, what with the way I feel about water, here, but it's a small lawn. It's also in the most shaded part of our 2.3 acre plot, and it's far less than an tenth of our total groundage, most of which is xerascaped or local scrub and brush. The amazing thing is that just looking at it makes me feel cooler. It's also getting watered everyday, at the moment, to establish it, and the watering, alone, has a cooling affect even on the interior of the house, especially when we're opening the house in the evening when things cool off.
It's astonishing what a difference it makes to have ground cover that is actually comforting to walk on with bare feet. The concrete, dirt driveway, and sticker-filled scrub are so harsh and uninviting. The grass is so cool and soft.
Of course, the mosquitoes love it. Because John pushed so hard to get a small patch of lawn, I'm pushing, just as hard, to get a Mosquito Magnet to deal with the insect attraction to the water. I don't mind all the other bugs that are going to love this. There are Monarch butterflies that now visit on a regular basis because of all the local wildflowers we put in our xerascaping, and that's very cool.
The birds are dying off, though, I think. I see fewer of them all the time, maybe an indicator that West Nile Virus is making its way through our area. There were articles where the East Coast areas that got hit first that indicated that that might be the case. Colorado has the highest count of human cases in the country for this year, and the wild animal life is certainly getting decimated by the stuff. It was really sad seeing a bird staggering through the air the other day and wondering if it was from brain damage from the virus. I don't have a personal problem with mosquitoes, but when it comes to the point where we might lose our wild rabbits, the coyotes, or all the small birds in the area, I'd far rather the mosquitoes went instead.
Jet's vocabulary has picked up, and his grammar's gone up a notch. He now says full phrases and sometimes even sentences.
On the home front, the lawn went in yesterday. It makes me squirm a bit, what with the way I feel about water, here, but it's a small lawn. It's also in the most shaded part of our 2.3 acre plot, and it's far less than an tenth of our total groundage, most of which is xerascaped or local scrub and brush. The amazing thing is that just looking at it makes me feel cooler. It's also getting watered everyday, at the moment, to establish it, and the watering, alone, has a cooling affect even on the interior of the house, especially when we're opening the house in the evening when things cool off.
It's astonishing what a difference it makes to have ground cover that is actually comforting to walk on with bare feet. The concrete, dirt driveway, and sticker-filled scrub are so harsh and uninviting. The grass is so cool and soft.
Of course, the mosquitoes love it. Because John pushed so hard to get a small patch of lawn, I'm pushing, just as hard, to get a Mosquito Magnet to deal with the insect attraction to the water. I don't mind all the other bugs that are going to love this. There are Monarch butterflies that now visit on a regular basis because of all the local wildflowers we put in our xerascaping, and that's very cool.
The birds are dying off, though, I think. I see fewer of them all the time, maybe an indicator that West Nile Virus is making its way through our area. There were articles where the East Coast areas that got hit first that indicated that that might be the case. Colorado has the highest count of human cases in the country for this year, and the wild animal life is certainly getting decimated by the stuff. It was really sad seeing a bird staggering through the air the other day and wondering if it was from brain damage from the virus. I don't have a personal problem with mosquitoes, but when it comes to the point where we might lose our wild rabbits, the coyotes, or all the small birds in the area, I'd far rather the mosquitoes went instead.
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 08:18 am (UTC)I'd heard enough that was good about them and how they work that we finally just had to go get one, the acre coverage, even, and even in just one night cycle, we've caught about a hundred mosquitos!! So I'm really glad.
John got it yesterday, set it up last night, and it's doing its thing, definitely.
Whwe.
I'll be so glad to be able to just go outside without dousing myself with DEET.
Yay for dead mosquitos!!