Neighborly

What a lovely morning! Honestly, it's almost 9 a.m. and it's still only 60 degrees outside with just a slight breeze. After the 90-degree temperatures and extremely high humidity last week this is SUCH a relief.

One thing I love, love, love about our neighborhood is that I can walk to the post office.

Not that I visit the post office too often what with the e-bills, automatic drafts, ability to just send checks online from our bank account, and my forgetfulness-turned-just-plain-apathy when it comes to mailing celebratory greeting cards of any form.

HOWEVER, I occasionally remember some birthdays in time to send an actual card in the mail. Like this morning. So, I walk to the post office. Mostly because some days our postal carrier seems to neglect our street, and I need to make sure these cards are sent out TODAY because even though I remembered these birthdays I did not act on the whole card-sending thing until the last minute so there's no time to spare if I'm to get credit for mailing out the cards before the dates in question.

I noticed on my walk through the neighborhood that everything seems friendly and prettier when it is not 90 degrees and humid outside. I actually retrieved one neighbor's pile of newspapers from the sidewalk and moved them to front porch since these people are obviously out of town and I don't really want to make that fact obvious to strangers will ill intent.

I'm a member of our neighborhood association (a recent development), and more specifically I'm on the membership and welcoming committee. This means at some point I will need to leave my house and go converse with some neighbors to try and get them involved in the neighborhood association.

This morning, on my walk, in the beautiful weather, I felt quite neighborly so it would have been the perfect time for some of the neighbors to make themselves available on their front porches or in their yards for me to chat with them and invite them to the next neighborhood meeting.

I guess no one on the street got the memo.

Yes, I know some people probably left super early for work, but I know for a fact that the majority of our neighbors are retired.

Soooo, I'm praying that tomorrow, being Saturday, will be another beautiful day to give me that push I need to be social.

In other news, I spent the majority of the day Monday working in our yard. I should have taken "before" and "after" pictures because, honestly, pulling weeds and trimming bushes does not exactly make for an awing finished product unless you have "before" pictures to compare it to. After two days of rain, I can now examine the lawn and find that the dallisgrass all over our yard that I spent so much time spraying with poison on Monday is, in fact, dying! (Along with some of the grass, but that's the price we're willing to pay.)

Incidentally, dallisgrass is described in the dictionary as: "tall tufted perennial tropical American grass naturalized as pasture and forage grass in southern United States". We have no cows to put out to pasture, nor do we wish to invite foraging wild animals into our yard, thus, no need for the dallisgrass.

(And just so you know, we have attempted over the past five long years to nurture the lawn to health in non-toxic ways: watering and fertilizing to promote the actual grass to spread over the weeds. It has not worked, so we are taking drastic measures with the poison.)

To make up for the poison, we're thinking of starting a compost pile and planting a vegetable garden.

It's a long-term plan.

Here's to a magnificent spring day.