My grasses. Let me show you them.

When we moved into base housing late last June, it was already summer in California and all of the grass in our back yard was either dead or near dead. Either way, all I had to do to it was ignore it.

Lawn care service and inground sprinklers are part of the base housing package here, except for the back yard patch. The landscapers do not enter the walled area and the sprinklers don't reach it. Fair enough, it's just a little 12' by 17' postage stamp. Surely we can manage that. Right?

Well, central California winter, aka the rainy season, was very kind to our grass, and even kinder to the weeds. By March, our barren rectangle of scorched earth had turned into Pandora.


It had become difficult to step over the shock of weeds and grasses that bordered the patio. It was so bad that I hadn't even noticed that Coco had made himself a secret spy nest in the corner of the yard. I decided that something must be done.


So I, in my infinite wisdom, headed out with my scissors, thinking I'd snip off the worst of it, dump the cuttings in the trash, and be done. Then Mother Nature laughed in my face. Not only were the weeds too thick to cut through, they also had prickly stems so I couldn't pull them out bare-handed.

And do I have gardening gloves? Of course not! This little area is the first "yard" that Jason and I have had. Don't get me wrong--this gal knows her way around a tool shed and can operate just about any motorized gardening equipment there is. I mowed the lawn at my mom's house many a time in high school and college, and my dad and stepmom run a farm, for pete's sake. I just haven't had reason to acquire any accoutrements of horticulture since moving out on my own. Jason, on the other hand, has never had a yard of his own to tend because his parents have always rented. You can't find someone more clueless about yard work than he is.

It was decided that we would get some thick gloves and some heavy garden clippers with which to handle the beastly weeds. So a couple of weekends ago I sent Jason off to the Navy Exchange to procure said items. He came home with a weed whacker... which we had specifically agreed that we weren't getting because we didn't want to spend money on one. I got over it when he told me it was only $40.

I was all ready to go tame the wilderness when we realized that the darn thing didn't come with a cord. So back to the NEX he went. And then he went again when the first extension cord he bought didn't fit into the whacker. By the time I got started, it was already late afternoon. I did as much as I could before I ran out of daylight.

It took two days' worth of hard work, but I finally got the weeds pulled out and the grasses trimmed down to a normal level. It doesn't look great, but at least I can walk through it.