The sprinklers in our yard go off every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (at 3 am, to be exact), and since that really means that they actually go off every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday night after we’re fast asleep and the calendar has hopscotched one day ahead, for a few hotter-n-hell weeks here this Summer, I was convinced they were broken.
I cursed at and futzed around with the impossible to decipher 1990′s era control, concerned with the hay-like state of our yard and the crunch of the bone dry grass beneath my feet. After a bit of deep thinking, I realized that the grass would not be wet on Tuesday mornings, but rather early on Wednesday mornings when the sprinklers would have just a few hours prior finished spurting and sputtering and doing their thing.
(Apparently I’m not the most cerebral when it comes to lawn work, but give a city-gal a break for a moment, would ya?)
The next Wednesday, I rushed out to make sure all was right in sprinkler world, and again – bone dry crunchy and cracklin’ grass. This in turn spurred a frantic call to our landlord (I’m killing the yard!), which caused a $100 visit from the overpriced lawn man (my grass is brown! our sprinklers are dead!), and many many sad and guilty glances out over the now tan-ish span of lawn that I was sure I had been accidentally thirsting to death.
After thirty seconds of tinkering and approximately the same amount of pondering, the lawn man informed me that, indeed, the sprinklers were working just fine; the nights were just so darn hot that by day break and dog walk the dirt had already sucked up all the water and the blades were back to their previously parched state.
A lesson learned during my first Summer in hot, dry, Colorado I suppose.
(But hey, at least my hair isn’t frizzy! It’s all about the small victories, people.)
