Ethan and Gemma

Ethan and Gemma

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

What's With All the Weirdness?

Yesterday was kind of a bizarre day. Sometimes we really feel like the world is just out to get us. . .stuff keeps happening to us that we couldn't imagine no matter how hard we tried. Like yesterday.

For a couple months now, we've had this weird tall grass/weed stuff taking over our backyard. It grows really fast, gets really tall, and has incredibly thick, strong roots so it's practically impossible to pull. We Googled some stuff that we thought it was (like crabgrass) and couldn't find anything that matched. So last night, on a whim, I thought, it really looks like stuff you see in a marsh to me so I randomly Googled 'marsh grass' (not expecting anything). As it turns out. . .that is in fact what it is. It's called cordgrass or spartina, and it generally only grows in saltwater marshes. Okay, so step 1 was done - we figured out what it was. Step 2 - how do we kill it? We start Googling that, and get all these hits about conserving the marsh grass and coastal erosion and preserving the wetlands. So apparently everyone is trying desperately to save this junk to prevent coastal erosion, and meanwhile we've somehow got it in our yard and there is nothing to kill it with because it's endangered or something. Maybe we can get the government to come dig it up out of our yard and transplant it into a marsh somewhere nearby? We ended up taking some shovels out there and digging up a few of the biggest patches (which was also fun), but there is so much of it out there that will literally take us years.

In addition to our yard turning into a marsh, it has also become infested with baby rabbits (possibly these are marsh rabbits who like the spartina?). So we can't get some sort of normal bug infestation that the exterminator can come take care of. No. We get infested with baby rabbits. We chased at least four of them off the other day when we were working in the yard. So if that's not bad enough. . .yesterday I go outside to scope out the rabbits and see what they are up to, and one of them has crawled up in this tiny niche between two boards of the fence. . .and died. So in addition to digging up marsh grass from our backyard, we also had to dig a dead baby rabbit out of our fence and dispose of it.

We finish all of this nonsense and decide to go play some tennis. I know, it's a bold move after the way things have been going. We head over to St. Andrews, it's slammed, so we make a U-turn and are sitting at the intersection of Playground Road and 61 waiting to turn right onto 61 and some jogger comes running up, apparently decides we're deliberately blocking his passage across the intersection (even though we've been sitting there waiting to turn for quite some time), gets really angry, and runs up and slaps our car as hard as he can. What the heck? Who just runs up and slaps someone's car? Cy was so ticked off by this (which is a rare event and should show just how well things were going for us yesterday), I seriously thought he was going to whip the car around and just run the guy over.

Dazed, we drive downtown to check out the courts at Colonial Lake. We pull in and this low-hanging tree branch scrapes the crap out of the top of the car (same car that has just been slapped by a jogger). And again, all the courts are full. We're like, what the crap?

So we head over to the public courts by the Citadel. On our way there, we see this Neo-Nazi skinhead looking guy on a motorcycle. He's wearing a black leather vest with studs all over it and there is a lime green mohawk sprouting from the top of his helmet. No joke.

We finally find a court over by the Citadel and it's okay (aside from being in the ghetto). It was a little hard to focus on playing what with the pack of dogs barking everytime anyone went past, and the loud music, and the fear of being shot. But we played, and made it home okay, and fortunately, there was no time for anymore weirdness after that.

Is it just us, or is all of that extremely bizarre?