Super busy weekend

I left the alarm set at it’s normal time so I could get up Saturday morning to make the trek up to Tampa to pick up the new mower. I had my old mower loaded up in the back of the truck which would make the truck significantly less aerodynamic going 80 mph up interstate 75. I was considering bringing along a tarp in case it rained but I figured what the hell, it hardly ever rains in the morning down here. Of course, it rained. Other than the rain, the drive went ok as I covered the 180 miles in around 2.5 hours. The guy selling it lived in a development filled with large houses on small plots of land. I was wondering to myself how this guy has all this mower stuff in a house like this. Once I looked in his 3 car garage I saw how. It was basically packed with stuff almost floor to ceiling with little pathways to walk through. The stuff consisted of basically tools, mowers, mower parts and car parts. Evidently the guy has a mower shop as well but the garage just stored the stuff he wanted to keep close by. Wow. One thing I immediately noticed that wasn’t mentioned on the ebay ad was the mower was a 6 speed. My old mower was a hydrostatic automatic which meant you simply had a foot pedal to go forward and backward. The 6 speed requires you to stop the mower everytime you change gears. It wasn’t a huge deal but still I wished I knew about it upfront. When I mentioned it to the guy he said “I didn’t have that in the ad?” Yea, ok. We unloaded my mower and then were ready to pull the new one onto my truck. It didn’t turn over and just hummed. Oh oh. Multiple tries and the same thing happened. It was raining again and before I got there he had hosed off the deck to clean it up a bit. After some troubleshooting he determined that it had to be the the solenoid that controlled the starter. Perhaps it somehow took on some water. So what we wound up doing was pulling the solenoid from my old tractor and threw it into the new one. Not an ideal way to have things go with my NEW tractor but after the swap it fired up just fine. As part of the deal I also snagged a spike aerator to help bust up some of the thatch that plagues our lawn. By the time I left the rain had stopped, cool. Of course, halfway home it started to rain again. 🙁

I unloaded the new tractor and mowed a small patch and then hooked up the aerator just to tool around and watch it poke holes in the ground. Simple fun. It mows well, it’s new and I have an aerator for 400 bucks out of pocket so I can’t complain too much. By the time I parked the mower it was around 2:30. Alison had to work on Saturday and wasn’t going to be home until around 4:30. In the next 2 hours I did a housework blitz in order to alleviate Ali from having to help with these chores later. In the space of 120 minutes I did the following:

Cleaned both bird cages
Cleaned both bathrooms
Dusted around the house
Did 2 loads of laundry
Pulled out our defective VCR from our AV shelf
Hung up some dog thing on the wall
Cleaned all the kitchen counters
Swept the kitchen and utility room floors
Swept the rest of the house

As I was vacuuming Ali came home. She didn’t believe I was cleaning everything after spending 6 hours driving earlier. I couldn’t quite understand it myself. I think part of the reason I do this kind of stuff is I want to make the weekends easier for Ali just because that is my nature. I think another part of it is to demonstrate to Ali what can get done in a short amount of time with concentrated effort. There are many days where I may be out doing something on a weekend and Ali is home all day and she will do one or two things around the house in the span of 8, 10, 12 hours. I have to admit it frustrates me because then even though it isn’t her intention, I immediately take on the responsibility of knocking out the chores asap so I can relax and do what I want the rest of the weekend. Her preference is to relax first and then get to the chores as she feels inspired (which sometimes never comes) , my preference is to bust ass and get the stuff done right away so I have uniterrupted free time the rest of the weekend. Our contrast on this issue causes conflict at times and my approach to resolving it is that I just do things and if she helps that’s great if she doesn’t oh well. I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t get to me sometimes but I mostly just grin and bear it. I also have been trying to cut back on the frequency and rigidity of certain chores so that has helped some.

After I got done vacuuming I took Ali out to show her the new mower. She mowed a patch out back. She isn’t thrilled with the 6 speed but otherwise reported it as a success. The built in fender cup holder scored brownie points. After her mowing test I pulled out the aerator and hooked it up. I stood on it as she drove so my weight assisted in making the aerator really work. I’m sure it looked pretty funny to drivers as we tooled around the front poking thousands of holes in the grass but hey it worked great, I don’t care if I looked dumb.

That night we went to one of Alison’s favorite restaurants, Iguana Mia. It is a mexican Chi Chi’s stlye restaurant on a smaller scale, without the big chain feel. They are really quick with service and our waiter must have asked us if there was anything we needed 10 times. Courtesy of an Entertainment book coupon, we got out of there with a 16 dollar bill. Can’t beat that.

Even with my efforts on Saturday we still had a substantially full plate for Sunday. The grass hadn’t been mowed in 2 weeks because of the mower failure 2 weekends ago. Our lawn looked like a wheat field with tall shoots of grass poking up everywhere. Alison rode the tractor while I weed whacked, weeded all the landscaped areas and filled the bird feeders. It was hot as hell, 94 and humid. The reported rain that was due to come in was only a few light showers in our area. By the time we got done with the outside stuff it was around 1. We ate lunch, watched an “I Love the 90’s” episode on Tivo (great show) and then came up with a great idea, let’s get more stuff at Home Depot so we can do more work!

So we cleaned up a bit and headed out. On the way we stopped at Blockbuster and picked up 2 movies. At Home Depot we snagged various things like some bolts, a replacement for the diseased topiary we had in front of the house and out of the blue we grabbed a 15 foot tall Jacaranda tree. Getting the tree home was a chore as it was very thin and wispy so we were concerned about branches breaking. I drove 50 mph on I-75 which is a dangerous manuever, but the reduced speed allowed us to get home with the tree intact with no damage. So we got home and did another work session planting the jacaranda, the topiary, 3 crown of thorn plants and some cauliflower we bought for the garden. The tree looks great where we planted it, at the spot where the broken mosquito magnet once stood. If the tree thrives it will be awesome because they are beautiful trees when mature.

The remaining hours of our weekend were taken up mostly by watching one of the movies we rented, The Big Leibowski. We rented it because of some funny clips we saw in the I love the 90’s show. It looked very funny. It was very funny in a whacked out weird way. A very different kind of movie that I enjoyed. The diverse cast of characters in the movie is really out of the ordinary. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and the guy that played Jesus the ace bowler were the funniest characters in the flick. I’d recommend it. Another movie we saw in the show was Slingblade, I want to rent that one later as well, looks good.