It's Fall.

The way you can tell this is that it's impossible to see the lawn any more for the carpet of leaves covering it.

This does not bother me. You see, I've got a fairly large yard. So I have one of those riding lawn mowers to cut the grass. And a few years back, my old college roommate Chris Brown (aka CB, aka Cool Breeze), who had a lawn service company at the time, gave me an amazing tip. "Just put the bagging attachment onto your tractor" he said. "It'll suck the leaves up like a vacuum." Best lawn care advice I ever got! On top of bringing up all the leaves it also mulches them, so they take less space. What a deal!

I've been doing this for the last 5 years and I love it. It takes what used to be an incredibly tedious job and makes it just another day mowing the lawn.

Well it was Saturday, and the leaves were out there waiting, so I prepared to go vacuum the lawn.

As I was getting my clothes together little Seamus came up. He was very excited! "Dad!!" He said. "The lawn is covered in leaves" [I knew that part] "Let's make a leaf pile we can jump in!"

Damn!

What do you say to your 5 year old? "Sorry son - I've found a much more efficient way of dealing with the leaves that doesn't result in leaf piles"? Not that I wasn't tempted. But I just couldn't do it.

So instead of riding on the tractor for 45 minutes I spent 2 hours raking leaves so the kids could jump in them for 3 minutes.

And it was worth it.

Go figure.