The road to global warming is paved with good intentions

After more than a month of mowing the lawn with an ecologically friendly mower, approximately every square inch contained a super-weed-grass blade that was close to 1 foot high. Turns out that the hippy mower doesn't do such a great job with the weeds. In fact, it does such a poor job that our neighbor volunteered to mow our lawn for us. He's laughed at us over the last few weeks when we've worked 4 times as hard as he has (push the mower, rake the leaves ourselves instead of having the mower pick them up, use a mechanical edger, etc.) only to end up with a fairly miserable looking yard. Finally, we gave in and let him mow. Our lawn looks better than it ever has.

So now, it's either buy an electric mower, and hope that it is not too inferior to the gas mower, or, just give up and buy a tried-and-true, gas-guzzling, loud, smelly mower. By far the most frustrating thing is that we already contributed to excess consumerism and waste by trying to do the correct thing. I am certain that the overall negative impact to the environment done by the manufacturing of the hippy mower far outweighs the several weeks that we used it in place of a fully functional gas mower. Now, we have to experiment with an electric mower, that may also end up being a dud, or just give in. We'll probably still try to alternate between the hippy mower and whatever powered mower we purchase, but that'll be mainly out of guilt at this point.

By trying to go the middle road (maintain a lawn and yard, but do so in an ecologically friendly manner) we were supremely ineffective in reaching either goal.

Being a moderate is such a pain--at least we're good for scapegoating...