Our front "lawn" before we succumbed to property-value guilt

Here’s a question: How can you tell a weed from a plant? Darned if I know, except gardeners have it in for weeds. Weeders are the serial killers of any green things they didn’t plant themselves. We have weed killer, but not fern killer or boxwood killer. What’s up with that?

I’ve seen my neighbors pull up one perfectly good-looking green thing and plant another that looks pretty darn close. I don’t get it.

You’ll never catch me weeding. Live and let live, I say.

Like everything else, this attitude probably stems (get it?) from my childhood. There were no weeds in my life. No grass either. And my parents were too busy making ends meet on the inside of the flat to worry about what was on the outside. Nature took care of that however it wanted to.

Like Woody Allen, “I am two with nature.”

For a long time, I held out on the property-value argument. Why should I pay more attention to what prospective buyers might want in the distant future, as opposed to what I want now? It’s still my house, not theirs.

Expensive rocks/labor to supplant the offending, free weeds

Finally, this year I succumbed to the think-of-the-neighbors thing and agreed to get rid of the weeds. So now we have rocks that we paid $$ for instead of the freely growing green non-plants. I guess that makes me officially a 21st century suburban homeowner.

Note: this blog was inspired by one posted by my friend and author Lois Winston, most recently the force behind the anthology SLEUTHING WOMEN, a collection of ten first-in-series novels.

I have lots of photos from my trip to New York City for the ThrillerFest conference, but here’s one that says it all. It’s the tip of my cane, worn down from walking through Grand Central and up and down the streets and avenues.

Tip of my cane. The silver sliver is where the rubber is completely worn off!

In the next weeks, you’ll see more artistic captures from my museum breaks. Here’s a taste, from a delightful sculpture exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design, properly called MAD.

"Steam" from the sinking ship forms the table!

A bent Eiffel Tower is the base of this lamp.

New York never disappoints — more proof to follow.