phik

I grew up in Ohio, but not in one of those hyper-competitive suburban families that uses products like Scott’s Turf Builder Plus, owns a miniature lawn tractor, or contributes to the crippling drought-induced water shortages. We didn’t use edgers, trimmers, or mulch. No, my suburban family spent the summers embarrassing our upper-middle-class neighbours with our middle-class squalor, competing for the brownest and most sickly lawn on the block. I was thrilled, because it meant I could stop mowing.

So it was with some not-inconsiderable shame that I found myself standing outside this afternoon, watering my expensive new instant-lawn, when almost any idiot could see that it was about to start raining. The thing about sod is that you have to soak it, basically create a standing lake in your yard, every day for the first couple of weeks. And since green grass sells houses better than an open mud pit laced with dog poop, I’m willing to do what it takes.

But it’s so ridiculous.

Joe and I went to the 7-11 tonight, to buy some critical supplies, and our total came to $7.11.

The not-on-strike immigrant store manager suggested that this had never happened before. I believe it.

I was really looking forward to finally getting around to installing Carbon XEmacs, since XEmacs on X11 always felt disjoint from the rest of the desktop. Alas, I basically require gnuclient, which didn’t work. And hasn’t for almost a year, apparently.

Well, if you suffer as we did, suffer no more: carbon-gnuclient.diff. Hopefully it will go into the next release.

I guess Vlad deserves some credit for badgering me into wading into the XEmacs code, instead of just giving up.