A reading from The Yak’s Big Book of Garden Wisdom:
“If it’s on fire, you should probably unplug it and/or turn it off.”
I don’t normally blog on Sundays, but for an ox in a ditch, I’ll make an exception.
I was sitting in my office working on a pleasant project when the contractor who recently fixed up the house across the street (To flip. In a bad market. Should have been my first clue.) showed up to maintain the lawn. The house is vacant, you see, and although they used cheap sod (which doesn’t look nearly as nice as my own recently-redone swath of green, but I digress) it does occasionally want a clip. In itself, nothing unusual there.
The contractor went around the corner into the garage, pulled out the mower, and cranked it up … at which point the machine belched out a cloud of acrid-looking smoke larger than the contractor’s F-250 pickup. About four times larger. The plume went up like a mushroom cloud, to my amusement and the contractor’s dismay.
Two minutes later I, too, flipped to the dismay side of the aisle. Because the contractor restarted the mower (sending up a second plume of epic proportions) and started mowing the lawn anyway – with the recalcitrant mower belching smoke like half the tribes of the American Southwest calling for reinforcements. Seriously – the cannons at Antietam didn’t send up this much smoke. Yet on and on our contractor friend mowed, blissfully ignoring the billowing clouds of carcinogens wafting across the lawn, over the house, and around the cul de sac. At least, I assume there was ignoring going on. At some points the smoke was so thick I couldn’t actually see across the street.
By the end, the contractor was literally running across the lawn, apparently hoping to finish the job before the mower either quit working or exploded in flames. I watched from the office window, not sure whether to place my money on terminate or incinerate – or both.
Fortunately, the lawn is small (much smaller than mine, due to the wedge-shaped lots and the fact that said contractor turned half the front lawn into ugly_garden_lined_with_rocks_001 rather than sodding the whole thing) and by some miracle the mower actually managed to survive the job. As I write, the contractor is loading the unruly machine into the F-250, hopefully for a much-needed ride to some garden tool E.R.
That or there’s a civil war re-enactment somewhere that needs a stand-in for the cannon.
