There was that whole thing about buying a house. Moving went pretty smoothly even if it did take a thousand years to clean out the old place. I expect it will only take a few hundred more to finish unpacking.
Yard maintenance has turned out to be more difficult than I expected. We planned to buy an old-timey reel mower, like this:
However, we didn't actually get around to purchasing one before we had the lawn that needed mowing. We innocently thought we could mosey over to Home Depot and pick one up after we moved in. According to the Home Depot guy they only sell reel mowers on the web site. According to the web site, they don't sell them at all.
By this time the lawn was getting a little shaggy, so we figured we'd hire a landscaping service to hack the lawn into a manageable state while we decided where to buy a mower. We picked some guy out of the back of the neighborhood magazine, and he set up a time to come out and give us an estimate. Once he got there (two days later) he took one look at it and decided there was no way he was touching our nasty, shameful lawn with his precious equipment.
On to Plan B. I called my Aunt and asked to borrow her lawn mower. She said, "Sure," but warned me that it's a little tricky to use. In order to start it, there's a lever you have to wiggle, but not too much. And a thing you have to press, but not too hard. Etc., etc.
The Husband, after much persistence, did manage to start the thing up, which was much easier once we figured out the spark plug wire had fallen off, and wrestle it into submission long enough to get a good start on the lawn.
In the meantime, the reel mower we ordered from The Great and Powerful Internets arrived. Turns out I'm too short to operate it properly. Oh, darn. Poor The Husband will have to be in charge of mowing the lawn all by himself. I really do feel bad about that, but I also feel bad about being a border-line midget, so I'm glad some advantage is to be had from my shortcomings. (Get it? Shortcomings?)
The Husband finished up the front yard pretty well with the reel mower, relieving my fears of an angry mob of neighbors and code enforcement officials descending on our house with violence in their hearts. However, the back yard was still an extravagant wonderland of weeds and crabgrass, so The Husband went back to working on it with my Aunt's gas mower. Well, that project wasn't even half-way done when the pull-cord started coming unraveled.
Oh well, no one can see the back yard anyway. But, with all the rain we've been having, the front yard needed to mowed again by this point. So, The Blessed Saintly Husband got the reel mower back out. Only now the blades wouldn't turn, so the mower was about as effective as this only less fun.
Now we were back to Plan A.2 or whatever the hell it was, and we called a landscaper. Who didn't show up. How do these guys make money mowing lawns when they won't actually mow any lawns? Is the whole landscaping business just an elaborate front for money laundering or something?
Anyway, in a dramatically anticlimactic twist, we finally found someone who did show up and mowed the lawn. The End.
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