Lawns

Hubby is still home, sleeping and occasionally waking up to say "I'm hungry."
I watered the lawn in acknowledgement of the neighborhood lawn Nazis. There are more and more of them here. I used to feel quite comfy in my half-pink/half-beige house(landlord's fault, I just rent) with the weedy lawn (I think of it as indigenous vegetation) because there were similar crappy lawns/houses on either side of me. You could set your watch to the lawns across the street, they are so picture-perfect.
Then someone bought the house next to me and it's all painted one color with co-ordinating trim and the lawn is just stellar in its green crewcut.
So then there were two, that's my crappy lawn and the crappy lawn belonging to the drug dealer next door (plus he had an open hole in his driveway which made my dirt driveway look slightly classier) but he got divorced, had to sell the place and is gone...not that I'm really really sorry to see him go, but he didn't mess with me and I didn't mess with him.
So now "someone" is cleaning up over there and I imagine some suburban Martha Stewart clone is going to move in there and really make my house look like shit.
In that case, there's only one crappy lawn left in my immediate vicinity and that's the guy across the street, two lawns over. He actually got one of those "clean it up" tags from the city one time(so did I but that's neither here nor there).
He's kind of like me, a pale hermit that rarely comes out of the house and when he does anything out there, he wears these bright yellow dishwashing gloves.
In defence of my lawn, it's rarely over four inches high, the gophers enjoy rooting around ( I like to watch them) and the birds find interesting things to eat or play with in it. I've got a nice big row of lavender bushes on the side of the house that the hummingbirds love...and I live in California where water is precious so if I don't water the lawn that often, I'm a conservationist, right?...and if the newspaper breaks down in it, it's kind of like I'm composting...