Lawnmower Man

So I'm back in J-ville for a few days and one of the pleasures of being home is getting to mow the lawn. Yes, getting to. It's that awesome.

Okay, it's not. Mowing the lawn is a chore made all the more difficult by the Ryder family's long-standing policy on lawnmowers. Apparently Mom never wanted to mess with the gas part of owning a gas mower, so we've used more alternative forms of mower propulsion.

The first one we used was, seriously, a push mower. An honest-to-God, straight out of a 1950's sitcom, looks like it should come attached with Jerry Mathers, push mower. You push, the blades spin, and if the grass is tall, get ready for a workout. You'd think the lack of a motor would make the thing pretty quiet, but you'd be wrong. It made so much racket that we actually made a pretty good profit off leasing it to community theatres who needed just such a loud prop/noise creator for a production.

Eventually we upgraded, but still not to a gas mower. We went electric, years before it was fashionable. Our current mower now only functions when you plug it in (usually with a very long extension cord unless you happen to only want to mow in a 2 foot radius from an outlet.) This leads to some very tricky cord manipulation which I have only recently started to get an actual handle on. (Josh and Dad have gone on record as saying they still aren't good at it.)

You see, in order to make quick work of a lawn, the "back-and-forth" technique is often utilized, but when you're dragging a cord behind you on the "forth" trip, when you turn to go "back," the cord is often sitting right in your desired path. So you therefore are forced to either go for it and take your chances with running over the cord, thereby severing your only connection to the life-giving electricity, or trying in vain to whip the entire length of cord out of your way, which usually only results in the cord becoming disconnected or you getting whipped in the face. You can see how this makes for a very entertaining afternoon.

I try to rationalize the entire exercise by telling myself that, in my own small way, I'm helping to reduce America's dependency on foreign oil. But usually after the umpteenth time of reconnecting the stupid cord to the mower, I just get angry and feel like killing some dolphins.

And I love dolphins.