Encyclopedia Brown and the case of the Blue Monk

OK, the title of this post is misleading, because there is no actual CASE to solve... although If I WERE cleaver enough to come up with a few I would be very pleased with myself.

No, it's just that today we went shopping for ovens - just to get an idea of what was out there. And the major chain store we visited had exactly ONE OVEN that matched our specifications (double oven, 27 inches.) But while we were there I purchased a bag of grass seed because our lawn has been attacked by grubs and these huge bare spots are all over, and over the past few days, during the heavy rain, a great deal of dirt ran down the slope and collected in our driveway because nothing was growing to hold it down, so something had to be done.

So I got this grass seed and this afternoon, in the heat of the day, I walked up and down the slope in front of our house sprinkling this seed. Now, I've been reading this book that starts off in a monastery in the 4th century, and I'm a little into it. So the whole time I'm putting my hand in the bag and sprinkling grass seed all over the dirt I'm imagining I'm a Monk at work, sewing seed in the fields out of my love for God or Food or something, a Monk who, apparently, has three small children running around. And people passing by the house were looking at me strangely and I KNEW I wasn't doing this grass planting thing properly - I didn't prepare the soil and I was just THROWING the stuff down... but they were kind of rude about it, the way they were looking... Did they know what I was thinking?

At the end of my sprinkling I was just coming out of my daydream when I looked down and saw that my hands were both blue up to my elbows... apparently this grass seed has dye in it. And my face, which had been sweating and that I had been rubbing... it was also streaked with a bright blue. My feet were blue because I was wearing flip flops. No wonder passers by were giving me odd looks.


Anyway, I went inside and washed up. Then I checked the weather for the next couple of days, to see how favorable grass growing conditions were going to me. And just in case you didn't know, this is something you should do BEFORE spreading seed. Because the forecast for TODAY said "THUNDERSTORMS AND HEAVY SHOWERS." And five minutes later buckets of water were pouring from the sky. And thirty minutes later the sun was shining again, but all the grass seed had run off, along with the loose layer of soil on top, into my driveway.

So the Mystery question is either: How long before my driveway has more grass than my lawn? Or: How much will it cost to redo our entire kitchen so we can get whatever oven we want?