What Chores and Tasks Do You Dread Most? (And May Even Try to Push Onto Other People...)

So you are one of THOSE. It drives me nuts when people have ruined all that lovely lawn and garden space by putting down gravel. Its like saying, "I didn't really want a lot this big even though I paid tens of thousands of dollars extra to get it, so I will just destroy it."

Oh, and I LOVE mowing the lawn. Just so long as someone else maintains the mower.

Who said I paid extra for a big lot?

But it's hard to find a house with no yard at all. They just don't make those. So whatever yard I have, it's gonna get covered.

Sounds like your experience is notably different than mine since I have seen so much of the new construction have barely any if any yard. In my last town, they built a row of new houses across from the library. The lots were so small they had barely any yard, especially on the plans where the garages went to the ally instead of the street. Then some developers bought this beautiful old farm with some lovely trees and a few older homes. They bulldozed everything to build all these new townhouses with absolutely no personal yard space, but just communal grass that you presumably have to pay an HOA to mow. What a waste! Then, though the economy dropped before they could be built, we got a thing in the mail about a huge new townhouse complex they were going to build a block from our home, and there was to be almost no yard space. All of these projects were within walking distance of our house, and I only lived there for 3 years.

Maybe you should move to my last town if you don't want a yard. Apart from the yard-less new construction, the town looked like a Hallmark movie. Although I'm pretty sure there was much more of this kind of construction closer to the population center of the state since the price of land is through the roof - oh wait you can't afford to build a roof after you buy the land that you are probably just going to ruin with gravel.

Keep in mind I don't even own this property yet. This is what I plan to do when I retire, and that's still a good 20 years away.

But if I did get this hypothetical property and cover it with theoretical gravel... What's it to you? This is my future yard, not yours.

In truth, do to your own as you see fit, but it does hurt my heart for a few reasons. First, I have no visible path to ever owning my own place, though I don't dismiss God's divine intervention to do the impossible. Therefore it is painfully frustrating to watch those who are blessed with such things do what to me is a destructive waste. Second, when my roommate and I were looking to move together and she was planning to buy a house, it was frustrating to find that so many of the houses in our meager price range had, had the yards so destroyed. (You might want to note a possible correlation there, by the way.) This was particularly frustrating because our last house had, had the yard done to it so, though the grass had grown through anyway. It was quite a mess and made it difficult though necessary to mow. It was therefore also quite apparent how such things become knotted and are not easily undone by those who come after. Finally, I don't know how to be anyone else and to me gardening is one of the biggest joys in life. Therefore I can't imagine anyone wanting to destroy something so valuable on a level that transcends even money. And because of gravel's aforementioned practically permanent transformation of a landscape, such a behavior is on par with a football fan finding that their house's previous resident had destroyed the TV and in away that it could never be fixed or replaced. Therefore please forgive my razzing you about your affinity for gravel, but also understanding the truth behind it.

I hope you get your house someday even if you do destroy its precious green space with gravel. Surely you are more important than the yard

Yeah, it hurts your heart...

It hurts my heart when I see people blowing more than 1,000 bucks on a new phone... And then blowing more than a thousand bucks on a new phone again in 2 years... And then looking down on people who have what they consider to be an inferior phone.

That hurts my heart in the nerd area and the money area. I can find better phones for cheaper and I am not rich enough to blow that much money even if I wanted that phone. It also hurts my heart that people use phones as a metric for whether they should look down on other people or not.

That doesn't mean I go around castigating people who use iPhones.

Yes, but I'm not castigating you. You did hit one of my pet peeves but mostly I'm razzing you because I think you are a cool person and I think you are mature enough to take it. Now shall we fight to the death on whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza? 🍕 I'm anti, though in truth I'm much more passionately against gravel.

We cannot fight about that, as I am also anti.

But I can pick it off the pizza.