The plants are always greener on the other side (or at least they are alive)

I think... no I know I took for granted how easily thing grew in Houston. I mean I think we watered our lawn maybe five times the whole two years we lived in our house and the grass always looked green. Whenever the greenery started looking a little sad it would rain. Unfortunately (for my yard) landscape maintenance is not so easy at our new house. In contrast to the overgrown vacant lot next door our yard looks okay, but it doesn't help that our other next door neighbor has a really nice yard. In fact they even have a cute little landscape feature that is sort of theirs even though it is in our side yard. They also made a few improvements in our yard after we bought the house but before we moved in. It was kind of nice because they did exactly what I was planning on doing.

A couple of weeks ago when our yard wasn't looking particularly fabulous we walked outside for a family walk. Our mailbox has two little planter boxes on each side of it and there is a little (nearly dead because the sprinklers don't spray them) flower bush thing in each one... well there was. As we walked down the driveway I noticed one was gone. My first thought was "I can't believe the neighbor stole our dead plant. I get it, we need to take care of our yard, but now it looks silly with one missing plant. And why didn't they pull the weeds when they pulled the plant?" Br and I went back an forth about why someone would take our sad plant. Suddenly Duchess (our dog) started walking weird. She thought there was an animal in the street up ahead that she thought she needed to get. I pulled her back and said "that's not an animal Duchess it's just a weed". We got a little closer. It wasn't just any weed it was our sad plant. Turns out it wasn't stolen (of course it wasn't, why would someone steal a plant) it just up and blew away. How sad, my landscaping became a honest to goodness tumbleweed. Time for some serious yardwork.