This will be a work in progress...

Jay left for Africa yesterday and instructed me to go water our very dead grass at our new house every day to try to help it. So I went over there today and found myself watering more dirt than grass:

I think when the former owners decided to sell, their realtor told them they needed to work on the front yard. So they threw some pieces of sod out there to fill in the holes, but I honestly don't know if it did much good. But today I did water all that dirt and all of our little squares of sod.

Sidenote: Notice all of the neighbors' nice yards across the street. Ours is the ONLY house on the block with dirt and squares, so obviously this is not a case of climate, bad dirt, too much shade, etc.