"What happened to the rakes?"

This morning, as I walked the dog near Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, I noticed something. It was quiet. There was no annoying sound of a leaf blower.

It took me a minute to wrap my brain around the concept.

You see, just about every other day of the week somebody somewhere near my apartment is working on somebody's lawn. As stereotypical as it may be, all you really have to have is a truck it seems, a lawnmower, a weed wacker and a backpack leaf blower. I say "stereotypical" because I haven't seen one yard work crew that was not Hispanic. And the one time I approached the operator one of those backpack leaf

blowers, he couldn't understand me and I couldn't really understand him. I don't want to get into the whole illegal immigration thing here and turn this posting into a debate (Besides, who's to say these crews are illegally working in the United States?) but I have no problem with someone coming here to try and make a better life for themselves.

Isn't that the premise upon which our great country was founded in the first place? And not to turn into "Mr. History Lesson," but to my understanding, the only people in the U.S. who didn't come from somewhere else are the American Indians. So I don't get it when certain people rant and rave about how certain other people shouldn't be here and how there is a certain crime element that comes in ... blahblahblah ... and how we need a border fence ... blahblahblah ...

BS!

I don't really want to do yard work, anyway. Nor do I want to clean up after folks, or care for someone else's kids. I'll do these things if I absolutely HAVE to. And the way things are going with the economy, who knows?

It was worse before I moved to Sherman Oaks a couple of months ago, when I was in North Hollywood. There, the noise started promptly at 7 each morning. It didn't help that I was often getting into REM sleep right about this time.

And the racket would go on for about two hours or so.

But the lawns were neat. That's for sure. And the lawns are neat where I live now, as well. It's just a bit noisy, that's all.

It's just the use of a leaf blower that gets me. Leaf blowers are noisy. They're bad for the environment. Whatever happened to rakes, anyway? Can anybody tell me that?

At least once a week, the outfit that works on the grounds of my apartment complex clears the garage. With a leaf blower.

One day recently, I saw the operator blowing three leaves across the garage floor and out into the street.

Three leaves.

-30-