My war on crickets in underway. I found a mound of the awful-sounding pests and doused them in the Sevin poison. We’ll see how that goes. This was the first mound but it is not the only one. As I begin to peel back the layers of overgrowth I am finding more and more of these hideouts. Today I even spotted what I believe to be a hawk circling my backyard, which argues there may be mice nearby.
Why are there field hawks in the desert? No clue. I have no idea about their habitat. What I do know is my habitat is jacked. I’ve done a terrible job of maintaining the backyard and front yard and as a result the place looks all sorts of junky. I don’t want to live this way and I don’t want to teach the kids the live this way. That is why I am so focused on turning this around quickly and having them pitch in to get the work done. My eldest has a partially torn ACL (again) and is using this as an excuse to not do yardwork. As a result he’s been doing more of the inside jobs while the others are tasked with helping me on the outside. It is a lot of work that needs to be done, and I am trying to get a little bit more done every day. I still don’t have all the tools put together the way I need–I’ll need to work on the new cutter tomorrow. Once all is setup properly it should be an easy matter to tear through the grass. With a little effort I might be able to get two cutters running and be able to halve the work. Maybe even three!
There is so much to be done just to make this place look livable from the outside. It makes me wonder how I managed to let it fall so far.