It's raining today. We've been in the middle of a drought here in Western North Carolina, so lots of folks are very happy to see the wet stuff.

I, however, am so furious I've been doing my best Charlton Heston fist-shaking at the clouds. I've contemplated firing off a letter of complaint, but I can't find the ZIP code for Mount Olympus.

You see, I decided to get industrious this year and get an early start on planting my grass. This whole notion of raising grass from seed is still very new to me, and to call my early efforts mixed would be to completely ignore the fact that they've been outright failures. In Texas, my home for over two decades, when you want a yard, you go buy one in the form of blocks of St. Augustine grass sod, which you then lay on bare dirt and water until it dies. At least that was my experience. Some people actually got it to live, and bully for them. I think I'm yard-challenged.

Here in North Carolina, the process of transforming bare ground into ground covered with dead grass is far more complex. Our back yard was leveled right after the house was bought using the red clay soil that is the base material in this region. Besides being capable of imparting some truly marvelous stains onto shoes, clothing, carpeting, pets and small children, this soil is renowned for its astounding inability to sustain organic life even on the microbial level. I hear the Centers for Disease Control have even taken to using red dirt to line "clean" rooms, rather than more conventional biohazard protections.

Of course, I didn't know this at first, so I spent a few months spending good money for good grass seed, which I then sent to an untimely death by scattering it on soil that actually chuckled evilly as the seeds landed on it.

During new-parent classes at the local hospital, I ended up sitting next to a local landscaper, and seeing my haunted look and red dirt-stained fingers, he took pity on me and clued me in as to the proper way to plant grass seed. Having now executed this plan, at least partially, I am beginning to wonder if I've been the victim of some landscaper practical joke designed to leave me desperate, willing to pay said landscaper any amount of money necessary to relieve me of the burden of growing my own grass.

The method consists of multiple steps designed to beat the red clay into submission. At no point in the recommended procedure are the services of a witch doctor or bruja solicited, but I've been pondering it.

First, you have to break up the surface of the red dirt. If you've ever seen an orangutan at the zoo dragging a stick back and forth through the dirt in its enclosure, you have grasped not only the mental level but the amount of physical strength required to complete the task. What I'd originally time-budgeted as a two-hour job turned into seven hours of stoop labor that left my spine in knots, my shoulders slumped and my hands near to blistering even through my work gloves.

After that comes the spreading of pelletized lime over the broken-up dirt, which is supposed to do something to the soil pH, but seems to primarily make the entire yard smell like a pickle factory.

The next step is one of those man-against-nature things that always works out so well, often with such fantastic results as the Dust Bowl or the New Orleans levees.

A wheelbarrow-load at a time, I haul topsoil in and spread it over the yard in a two-inch layer. For the better part of three days, it was fill, walk, dump then spread with a rake. For those of you savvy in things soilish, the final tally was 2.5 yards of soil, or three pickup truck loads for those of us who prefer more conventional measurements.

That's it for the really hard work. After that, it's just spreading the seed, spreading hay over the seed so birds flying overhead will know the yard is full of yummy fresh food and putting up the temporary fence to keep the dogs from scratching crescents into the seed bed.

I haven't gotten to the easy part yet, and now I might not. The rains, which have been remarkably scarce for months now, have arrived in force, and I sit here typing right now watching rivulets of rainwater carry large quantities of my lime and topsoil off into the woods at the bottom of the hill. I'd cry, but that would just add more water to the deluge.

It is for times like this that single-malt Scotch was invented.

Anybody know a good Astroturf dealer?