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dmarleyI'm sitting here playing with the extremely nifty Boggle pen that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vaklam gave me a couple of weeks ago. It's an actual minature Boggle game, with a little box with teeny letter cubes that comes off the top, a little hourglass that fits into the grip, and, of course, the pen itself to write down words with. I've found a couple of good 4-point words, like "brother," and even got "gathered" out of one game. Much fun. Especially when I can amuse myself so easily by finding "fart."
When I was growing up, we mowed our lawn with a little Cub tractor with a bush-hog attachment--you know, those things they use to mow along the sides of the highways, only smaller. It was often my job to mow the lawn, and it was always an adventure to manipulate the sophisticated system of coat hangers (choke), rubber tubing (hydraulic lift), and twine (mower gear) that made the tractor go. Every time I would make a downhill turn, water would spout from the engine, and if I hit anything substantial, like a branch or root, the blade belt had a tendency to pop off.
Still, it was easier than using the pushmower, which was, in fact, older than I was and rather resembled Frankenstein's monster. My grandfather was a welder, and whenever something rusted off he'd just weld another piece back on. They did put a new--well, different--motor on it when I was in my twenties. But the fact that Pappaw used the old oil from his car and tractors for the mower meant that when it was running, it emitted large clouds of blue smoke, especially when it was actually cutting grass.
You can probably, therefore, imagine what pleasure it was to cruise peacefully around our new lawn on a fully functioning riding mower. Admittedly, the ten million safety features meant that starting the thing--and restarting whenever one of the said saftey features kicked in--wasn't much less complicated than jiggling the coat hanger and wrestling with the rubber tubing on the Cub. But it only took me 45 minutes to do the entire lawn, including numerous stops and starts to figure out what I was doing.
Just found "suet" with my Boggle game. I think my work is done.
vaklam gave me a couple of weeks ago. It's an actual minature Boggle game, with a little box with teeny letter cubes that comes off the top, a little hourglass that fits into the grip, and, of course, the pen itself to write down words with. I've found a couple of good 4-point words, like "brother," and even got "gathered" out of one game. Much fun. Especially when I can amuse myself so easily by finding "fart."When I was growing up, we mowed our lawn with a little Cub tractor with a bush-hog attachment--you know, those things they use to mow along the sides of the highways, only smaller. It was often my job to mow the lawn, and it was always an adventure to manipulate the sophisticated system of coat hangers (choke), rubber tubing (hydraulic lift), and twine (mower gear) that made the tractor go. Every time I would make a downhill turn, water would spout from the engine, and if I hit anything substantial, like a branch or root, the blade belt had a tendency to pop off.
Still, it was easier than using the pushmower, which was, in fact, older than I was and rather resembled Frankenstein's monster. My grandfather was a welder, and whenever something rusted off he'd just weld another piece back on. They did put a new--well, different--motor on it when I was in my twenties. But the fact that Pappaw used the old oil from his car and tractors for the mower meant that when it was running, it emitted large clouds of blue smoke, especially when it was actually cutting grass.
You can probably, therefore, imagine what pleasure it was to cruise peacefully around our new lawn on a fully functioning riding mower. Admittedly, the ten million safety features meant that starting the thing--and restarting whenever one of the said saftey features kicked in--wasn't much less complicated than jiggling the coat hanger and wrestling with the rubber tubing on the Cub. But it only took me 45 minutes to do the entire lawn, including numerous stops and starts to figure out what I was doing.
Just found "suet" with my Boggle game. I think my work is done.
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Date: 2004-04-03 05:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-03 05:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-03 05:24 am (UTC)I've got to see if our mower survived the winter. It's a little past time to get out there. Mowing our yard usually takes a couple of hours. Someone who had the house before we did apparently fixed cars in the farthest corner of the back yard because I keep running over metal bits out there. Other than that our yard is pretty easy to deal with.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-03 06:06 pm (UTC)Wow. Your very own home-grown shrapnel. I was actually kind of surprised that I didn't run into more bits of metal. Of course, I had the blade set as high as it would go because the clover and shepherd's purse and onions were nearly a foot high in places (Grass? What's that?). I've found a six-inch-long rusty iron spike under the deck, and keys and nails and pieces of asphalt, so I expect that once I actually cut the grass short I'll be slinging junk all over the place.
I think we still made it into the acceptable neighborhood window for grass cutting, because the guy across the street still hasn't cut his lawn, and our backyard neighbors haven't either. Tomorrow, the weedeater....
My sister's lawn is so small (about half the size of your front lawn, with no trees) that she decided she didn't want to waste the space in storage and fool with the maintainance of a gas-powered mower, so she bought one of those manual mowers. She can do her whole lawn in about 45 minutes, and gets in her exercise at the same time. :) She can also store the thing in her kitchen next to the back door, which I certainly can't do with Mr. Riding Mower.