This Space for Rent

The point where city living starts to lose its charm

It's not the first electric leafblower, operated by a homeowner who would rather spend 45 minutes aiming it at a single stubborn leaf instead of getting a rake and cleaning it up, and it's not the second one, but it's the third, so I get to listen to first one homeowner spending a hour and a half blowing the leaves out of their 15x40 front lawn, then the second homeowner, and finally the third.

At 6:30pm on December 17th. It's cold and it's dark, yet this stupid excuse for a human being is just standing there, in the freezing dark, slowly blowing a single leaf back and forth across his lawn.

Aaaaaarrrrrrrrggghhh! Get a rake, goddamn it!

Comments


A surprising thing to me about downtown Portland was the army of street cleaners walking along the curbs at midnight with leaf blowers.

I live closer to Vancouver Canada. Grass medians between downtown freeways are cared for by the homeless who rake up the refuse thrown out of car windows. The drivers whizzing by at 60 clicks also throw out money to these homeless self-appointed custodians. An odd system. Once I was talking to a homeless guy raking one of these medians. He was hoping to save up enough money to buy a leaf-blower.

Alison Sun Dec 17 22:39:46 2006

At least the damn things are electric. I get to listen to and smell gas powered ones.

We have a local noise ordinance that expressly prohibits the use of gas powered leaf blowers before 8am. That doesn’t stop Dennis, the gardener for most of the houses on our culdesac, from firing up his 360-horsepower, mega-professional noisemaker sometime between 7:15 and 7:30 on Wednesday mornings.

I’ve watched the gardeners closely when they have the blowers out. I’ve never seen them pick any piles up, so I can only assume they are just blowing the leaves to a less obvious place (like under the side door to my garage!).

Lynn Mon Dec 18 09:31:10 2006

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