[montsnmags]

This afternoon, out at our nature strip, on the downhill side and along the property line, I dug a small trench to lay, end-to-end, two 2.4m long treated pine "railway sleepers" on their side. We then drilled holes at each end of each sleeper, and I hammered long metal poles through them and deep into the ground.

The purpose of this will be as a "dam" to hold back hoop pine mulch on that downhill side. See, I want to get rid of the only bit of lawn we have - a 1-2 metre deep and property-width-minus-driveway strip (and it doesn't even belong to us; it belongs to the council, though we're required to maintain it) - because I resent having to mow something so perfectly pointless. So, we'll get a few cubic metres of mulch dumped in our driveway, I'll dig up the entire nature strip of lawn down to a sub-curb level, and then I'll fill it all with the mulch. Voilà! No more lawn-mowing! (Here's a tip for manual lawnmowers. Sure, they use no fuel, and are no doubt great for manicured lawns, but if your lawn is "contaminated" with leaves, twigs and bark and stuff from trees and nearby gardens, and made up tough-as-buggery grass-types, and all over a bumpy, sloping ground, your manual lawnmower will last about 15 minutes before breaking. It's not the bits of leaves twigs and bark and tough grass and uneven ground that'll break it - it's that its repeated jamming on things will cause you to swing it around like you're an Olympic hammer thrower and hurl it up the driveway or down the road, and apparently manual lawnmowers don't like that, but screw them they should have a warning label on them about their situational uselessness if they don't want to be tested aerodynamically).

Then I can plant the strip a bit, and maybe put some stepping stones in, and it'll all look nice and pretty with the rest of the nature-strip garden we maintain (why the hell we have 5-7m-wide nature strips, I don't know). If the council doesn't like what I'm doing (after all the other houses on the street have planted their nature strips so you can't even walk on them), I'll happily donate to them a near-new, almost-working, manual lawnmower, and they can have it straight away if they will just help me find a spot to put it by bending over forward for a moment.

Incidentally, it appears some lazy-arsed electrician or linesman has buried power cables or telephone cables about 15cm (about half a spade-blade thrust) under the ground from the pole out the front to wherever they're going. Those government/electricity supplier warning ads shouldn't say "Watch where you dig!"; they should say "Watch where you dig because when we put the lines in we really couldn't be farked getting off our lazy, uncaring, fat arses-where-we-keep-our-brains and doing much more than scraping off the top layer of humus to "bury" our cables before breaking for another smoko and heading home at 2pm or earlier if the temperature got to a blistering 20C or fell to a chilly 19C or if a small cloud appeared in the sky that could only have looked like rain if there was a sprinkler going somewhere nearby to add to our hopeful-but-limited imaginations, but our lawyers said if we issued this warning we can't be sued because it's all your fault for not making the obvious assumption that we are a pack of retarded dickheads who should be bludgeoned to death with hessian bags filled with half-bricks before we get a chance to procreate", but I suppose that might not fit in the necessary 30 second "community announcement" ad-slot.

Cheers,
Marc