Great moments in Lawn Mowing History: my first (and hopefully last) Riding mower.

I had an early Morning Breakfast with some Friends Saturday, but I got home in time to take a very important call from LOWES. About 8:45 AM the phone rang. "Mr Casey, Your delivery window is 10 AM to 1 PM."
  Oh yeah, it has been 6 long years of pushing the lawn mower around, but now I have a riding mower, thanks to the love and generosity of Mrs C.  Kathy Frederick at the Junk Drawer Blog might love her new Dyson Vacuum cleaner, but there are no words to describe how I feel about my Bolens model 762 Lawn tractor.

  
   Here she is, before I backed her into the garage and her personal parking spot. After they delivered her, and before I took her out for her first spin, I sat in the kitchen and carefully read over the operating instructions. I want her to last a long time, and I want to take care of her. (Don't worry, I do feel much the same way about Mrs. C) So it is vitally important that I know how to operate her properly and maintain her in tip top shape. I checked the oil, the battery cables, and gave her a good look over before I added fuel to the gas tank. It warmed my heart that she fired up on the first try. She even has a large bright headlight for mowing as it gets dark.
She has a great safety feature in that she will not run in reverse if the power transfer to the blades is engaged. I had a blast mowing my yard..... and a neighbors..... and then maybe another neighbors, I hope they didn't mind. But she has one feature that is the most wonderful of all, the kind a real man loves. My lawn mower has.........

A Cup Holder!

Is that not the greatest idea in Riding Lawn mower history? I loved mowing my lawn so much on Saturday that when my wife pointed out I had missed a spot I had to mow the whole thing again on Sunday.

Eat your heart out Kathy Frederick!

A man holding on to what he can....through Farmville

    Over the past three weeks one of my old friends from the Army that I had not heard from in close to twenty years reached out to me on Facebook. We started trading messages and over the course of time he told me about how his wife had been killed in a car accident caused by the bad weather in February.

    We share things with other people for all kinds of reasons. sometimes it is egotistical, to show what we think is our superiority, and sometimes we do it when we are searching for someone to commisserate our troubles with. In his case, he was searching for someone to share his burden with.

   I did what friends do, I read his words and I responded as supportively as I could. I don't want to go into too much personal detail, but I realized as I was reading that his sense of loss was profound in a way I could not imagine.

  He and his wife worked many miles apart in different industries, but they both worked at a Computer. He told me how they had regularly communicated during the day via Facebook. Since her death, it had been difficult for him at work, because he missed her regular messages.
   But he couldn't stay off Facebook, because he felt an obligation to take care of her cyber farm on Farmville. It had been an ongoing competition between them, to get the craziest and wildest things on their Cyber farms. He asked me if I thought it was stupid that he do this, go to her farm each day and feed her animals, and harvest her crops. Farmville let people get puppies this week, and he got one to keep her avatar company while he is working. He thought she would like that.

   I don't think he is stupid. I think he loved her so much that he is holding on to whatever he can to keep her in his life.

   My point in writing this is that sometimes I have made fun of people who spend way too much time online, and I tell them to get out and get a life. Yet here I find someone who goes online during the day to try and hang on to one that is gone. Who the hell am I to judge?



  

What I did for Easter: I took down the Christmas tree!

This is not our Christmas tree. It's a picture I pulled off Google images.
I know, I know, Christmas was what, 15 weeks ago? I have been busy, blogging and stuff.
    Anyways, I got up around 5 AM, left at 6 AM. and drove the three hours home. We were at the annual Saturday night family Easter dinner gathering and I came home on this beautiful spring day with the express purpose of getting some yard work done. Mrs C is arriving later.
   Imagine her surprise when she sees the artificial tree is put away and the stand back in the basement.
  I figured if I have to carry stuff up OUT OF THE BASEMENT! I might as well carry stuff down too!
   I would like to try and claim that my tree has a different meaning for me, but that is B.S. I could claim that I put the tree up for Christ's Birth so naturally I take it down when he rises from the dead, because....
   maybe they needed the wood for the cross?!!!
        So I have accomplished something this Easter, I put away the christmas tree! I retrieved the dogs from the kennel, and I cleaned all the carpets and floors. Now I have to go shopping for a new lawn mower.
   For a man, that is a just reward!