Evening Activities & Sick Friends

My task last night was to apply lawn fertilizer to all the lawns. The directions called for applying it to a wet lawn with no rain expected for the following 24 hours. In addition, the spreader must be used both directions on the lawn to prevent "stripes" from appearing. (Our rule, not theirs.)

Most of our lawn is watered by an automatic sprinkler system. The large front lawn is actually a "shared" lawn with our very friendly neighbors. Hence I needed to manually activate our neighbor's automatic sprinkler system (in addition to our own) in order to get the grass wet. Our system has a few zones, all currently assigned to the lawn. Our neighbor's system has 12 zones! I was not sure how many or which ones were assigned to the lawn.

After a little experimentation (our neighbors were not home) I discovered that there were three zones to be activated...but that they could only be turned on one at a time (to prevent the water pressure from being too low for any single zone). All very fascinating.

Finally the grass was wet. I prepared the spreader...using half of the recommended setting since I was going to cover the lawn twice...making passes each direction...and began the job.

My first observation was that it seems to me spreaders should spread behind you instead of in front of you. I realize this isn't really practical in one sense, but it would mean your shoes didn't get covered by whatever you are spreading. Next I noticed the pattern the spreader uses and tried to keep my "passes" on the lawn even and straight.

It is a good thing that I carefully observed how it all worked because guess what?! Yep, it got dark before I was done. So I finished in the dark. It was just light enough for me to see where I had been on my previous pass, so I'm pretty sure it was a nice even job.

Last night my housemate went to bed early. This morning she was feeling sick. That feeling developed into actually being sick. When I got to work I discovered that another co-worker called-in sick. Still another co-worker who is gone on vacation got sick (as did his wife...she reported it on her blog from their vacation location). And a former co-worker (who the above two co-workers still visit with regularly) has also been sick. Ugg. I'm taking my Airborne!