For many years we hired our next door neighbor to mow the lawn. Last year my brother wanted to save us the money we paid for this, and bought a lawn tractor and vowed to mow our lawn, which was quite sweet of him. We did fine last year but it is not working out very well this year. Stubbornly I have been trying to mow my three acre yard with an electric push mower. That is not working so well either.
What to do? My brother is trying the best he can to assist, but the lawn tractor he bought is old, and my wacky problem with The Legs is not conducive to driving the thing safely. I may try to run it tomorrow as I have mowed about an acre today, that leaves two to go. When he runs it, it makes his pre-existing back problem worse, so I become consumed with guilt just to have a decent looking yard.
On top of everything, my central air is not working. I have a unit in my sunroom that works, and a whole-house fan that I can use to cool the house at night, but without the central air in the daytime it gets mighty muggy down here in old Missouri. Getting competent people to work on AC in my rural area is hard to do but I have someone's name who was recommended by a friend, so will try next week to call him. Holiday weekends are bad times to have equipment failures!
Tonight I am hot, tired, sweaty and The Legs and The Headache are protesting. But in front of the house the lawn is almost perfect, and I almost have the front portion of the side yard complete. This means I can look out the front windows and pretend the entire yard looks like this! Maybe I should just do this, live in story book perfect yard land just in my head, and never look out of any of the other windows again!
The main problem with tall grass in this section of the country is copperheads. These are silent snakes of the cottonmouth variety, and do not have rattles to warn you one is near. We have found them in tall grass near my driveway, just behind the garden, and in the utility sheds. I have a desire to have a copperheadless yard, where anyone can walk without fear of venomous snakes, so a well groomed yard is a necessity not a whim.
The flexeril Doctor SassyPants prescribed is not doing too well for The Legs and the nerve pain. I am trying to give it time, but may ask if I can increase the dose next week. Very difficult nights lately. One of these days I will catch up on sleep! I may pack my skanky old head in ice pretty soon, and see if I can lull The Headache into thinking everything is just fine!
I wish I could have one three day weekend where everything went perfectly. My family seems to decide to have all its crisis days on my days off. I don't know how we manage to time it so perfectly, but it certainly makes life interesting.
I almost forgot - I rescued a lost brown dachshund today at WallyWorld. An older lady came up to me while I was putting groceries in the trunk of my car (I am one of those people that strangers tell their life stories to, so I am used to being approached by people I don't know) and asked if I could help the little dog she had seen running through the HUGE parking lot. I drove my car over to where the little dog was last seen by the lady, and there he was. As soon as I approached, he ran into the propane tank business next to WallyWorld. It took me about 45 minutes but I persuaded him to come to me by jangling my keys and promising we would take a ride. He certainly knew what that meant. Luckily he had a collar with tags on it.
His name was "Oscar" and there was a phone number on it. Nobody was home and her voice mail was full, so I brought Oscar to my house for a visit, and found another phone number for Oscar's owner. I left a message, and about 3o minutes later she called. I found out how to get to her house, and drove Oscar back home. His momma owner was a little younger than my mom (probably in her 70's) and Oscar had managed to crawl out her slightly opened car window while he waited in the car for her to finish shopping at WallyWorld. Oscar was soooo happy to see her he hopped out of the car right into her arms and then pee'd on her! A happy ending for everyone, except her white blouse - eeck.
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