Blowing Smoke and Leaves

You will not catch me outside blowing leaves off the grass. No way.

If I were going to blow leaves, I certainly wouldn't do it while there were still leaves on the trees. That, I think, is pointless.

My friend, Mertis, begs to differ. She spent a lovely fall afternoon this weekend carefully blowing all the leaves off her grass.

For about 2 whole minutes the lawn was once again green. Then a gust of wind hit her big maple tree and now the lawn is yellow.

Now, she says, she has to do it all over again.

I ask her why she doesn't just let them stay there for awhile.

Mertis shakes her head. "Can't. It'll kill the grass."

Okay, I don't want to be stupid here, but isn't winter going to do that anyway?

Mertis looks at me like I'm stupid- which I may be but blowing leaves seems about as pointless as say...dusting my attic...or dusting underneath stuff that no one can see under...or maybe even dusting areas where no one's really going anytime soon...like the dining room.

We go in the dining room, what, three or four times a year? Why dust in there unless someone's coming over you don't know all that well and you're afraid they'll ask you to show them the chicken feeder you had made into a chandelier because no one else had one like it and you wanted to be the first...

Blowing leaves is as pointless as, oh, I don't know...balancing my checkbook.

Is the bank ever wrong? And if they are, is it ever enough to really make a difference? Like, has anyone ever gotten rich off a bank mistake? Have they ever gone to the Carribean for a vacation courtesy of bank error? I don't think so.

Besides, it's not like I don't know how little money I have in there. Why reconcile my checkbook with the statement? Isn't that like closing the barn door after you've given someone a taste of the cow's milk? I mean, balancing my checkbook will only make me feel worse about my miserable fiscal state. It could affect my self-esteem and do enough psychological damage to impact my motivation.

If I'm not motivated, how will I ever earn enough money to worry about balancing my checkbook?

There are so many more productive things I could be doing with my time...Like writing a blog every day for a month because I thought it seemed like a good idea. I told myself it would get me back into the habit of writing every day.

It has gotten me back into the habit, all right...the habit of being neurotically obsessed with what I'm going to write about!

Still, talking into cyberspace beats blowing leaves in the cold any day!