April showers bring angry grouches.

Enough with the cotton-pickin' rain!

Pictured: More rain.

We haven't had thunderstorms or the like, not in a couple of weeks, but April in New York has been like what Portland, Oregon, is reputed to be. Hard rain with long periods of drizzle. We haven't seen the sun in some time. I'm afraid it's gotten to be a red giant, it's been so long.

Some days it has not rained that much, just inevitably enough to make it impossible for me to mow the hilly jungle outside with my dinky lawn mower. Yes, it's all about me, ultimately, and my inability to tend to my lawn. Well, that and I'm sick of drying off the dogs. The big guy got groomed Wednesday and spent a chunk of Thursday morning exploring mud puddles. Yay.

But getting back to me. This wet grass really is a problem, because my old push mower is just not powerful enough to cut wet grass that's very tall, very thick, as it is in large patches. (I could almost tolerate the situation if the lawn was uniformly lush like that, but of course it mostly sucks again this spring, which means that all this suffering won't mean a good lawn anyway.) The previous lawn mower died in just such a situation, stalling constantly, unable to get through the high and wet grass.

I could try to be patient and hope that the sun returns and either destroys the Earth as a red giant star, in which case it won't matter, or dries out the lawn. But that would take days, and with grass this thick it might not even dry it out enough. Meanwhile the lawn is a breeding ground for snakes, bugs, and other things I don't want my dogs to encounter, nor do I want to encounter them myself.

Every day I've thought I could get out there and start it, and what do you know---whatever the forecast said, it's raining!

The weather might as well send me text messages.

Maybe I could buy some goats.