Eclectic Amateur

Rant: Modern Building Insanity

My lawn is dying.

This is not such a big deal in and of itself. (Blasphemer! shouts the spirit of Suburban Man™.) It's just some plants, after all. Not big stuff on the Cosmic scale. But it's the reason that it's dying that has me ticked off today.

You see, it's dying because we haven't had any rain in a while, and I haven't been running up my water bill by watering it religiously to golf-course-like greenness. The lack of rain shouldn't be such a big deal -- that's pretty common in July. At least, it wouldn't be a big deal if there were actually any topsoil there to hold moisture, rathern than just sandy subsoil.

You see, it's been standard practice for I-don't-know-how long for developers to start converting farmland to a new subdivision by bulldozing away all the topsoil first. That way, they can sell it back by the cubic yard to homeowners who actually want to be able to grow anything.

I used to blame some mysterious Suburban Ethic™ for the fact that everyone seeems to water contstantly to keep their lawns green. The SE does exist, but I see now that it's also a practical thing. Fail to water, watch your lawn brown back and die off. (Yes, I know that grass goes dormant. This is beyound dormant.)

To add insult to injury, we're on watering restrictions. The explosion of subdivisions has severly strained the water system, which can't support these untiold gallons being brought almost a hundred miles from the Detroit River to be dumped into the lawns of a hundred Washtenaw (and Wayne and Oakland) County subs.

Now, I grew up on farms. We always had acres of grass (I know, I had to mow it). We never watered our grass. It browned, but it was never in danger of actually dying and needing reseeding. Nancy is from older neighborhoods in Detroit and Livonia; she never saw such a thing either.

So our water shortage is not just the human vanity of homeowners, but the corporate greed of a generation of developers. Because, if they just left the topsoil where it was, the soil would work to retain water, and lots of this watering would be unnecessary.

Beautiful

Amy Wellborn blogs on the monks of Keur Moussa in Senegal who have adapted Gregorian chant to traditional West African musical forms. It's a fantastic antidote to my previous post.

The monastary's web site is http://www.keurmoussa.com/ (in French only), and their music is available there or at Amazon.com. Amazon.com has sample tracks on their site; you really should hear how fantastically beautiful this is.

"Art? Never met the man."

When Mark said modern art is crap, I didn't think he really meant that crap is modern art.

(*sigh*)

And Dr. Bill back in college wondered why I couldn't take modern "art" seriously, after having been introduced to Giotto, Fra Angelico, Michaelangelo, and the Dutch masters. "Zach, it's almost like you think it's just some sort of scam pulled over on the public." Yeah, that about nails it.

How to determine your home's worth online:

• Yahoo! Real Estate


• RealEstateJournal Home Price Check


• MSN HomeAdvisor


• HomeGain

  No available data for my area, but allows you to submit a request for a home valuation to one of their "approved" Realtors