Our lawn needed mowing in a bad way, we have an open house this weekend, and I just didn't see when Steve was going to get a chance. Kailin has swim tonight, he teaches dog school tomorrow night and it's supposed to be 88 and muggy with scattered thunderstorms on Friday. He's working Saturday before his company picnic at the zoo so that he can take Tuesday off to spend with the kids and me and the open house is Sunday. So there you have it. An insanely long explanation for why I just mowed the lawn. Not that any of it matters because I have actually mowed the lawn more often than not this year for various reasons. Moving on....
I thought it was a wonderful day for mowing the lawn. There is a nice breeze coming in and it was relatively mild out this morning when I turned off the a/c and opened the windows. One might even have said it was chilly. Of course when I put the children down, donned my "mowing shoes", and opened the garage door to pull the lawn mower out onto the driveway I found that the breeze was still there, but no longer coming off the lake (not as cool) and the sun is now out in full force. For my far away friends, make no mistake - it's probably only mid to upper 70's here, but for us that's been about the extent of it this year. (read - I'm a big old heat wimp and shoving a lawn mower up and down and all around in the sunshine is not my idea of a fantastic use of my nap time break. At the same token, had it been cloudy today the mosquitoes would've carried me off, so there is in fact a silver lining to every cloud - or lack thereof.)
I started out mowing in my usual method. The longest passes first making a right angle at the back of the lawn and mowing that stretch. What I usually do (since I know you are dying to know about exactly how our lawn is mowed) is turn around and follow the back of the yard back across and back up the long pass again. I decided to spice it up today and did a complete U around the yard and then back again.
The sweet scent of clover was in the air (read - our lawn is mostly clover right now and I'm making it sound like a good thing) and the sun was shining brightly (read -by this point I was sweating like a pig and wishing Kailin hadn't broken Steve's headphones so that I could be listening to my iPod rather than the soothing sounds of the mower (Incidentally, "sweating like a pig" is a bit of a misused phrase. Pigs don't actually sweat. That's why they need the mud. So either I am the only one using it to mean profusely sweating and in fact everyone else who uses it is proclaiming with joy that they managed an arduous task without perspiring at all, or we're all using it wrong.).).
On one of the passes into the front yard, I took care of the sections between the sidewalk and the road (as you may remember (unless I am the forgetful one and actually never blogged it), last time I mowed, I ran out of gas with one swipe left on one of those sections. Even I had to laugh at that one.). When I started running out of side yard, I took care of the rest of the front yard and made a final pass into the back and then completed that in concentric rectangles. Our lawn seems to require 1 + 1/1,000,000 of a tank of gas to mow (hence the issue with the last pass on the front curbside). I decided that if I ran out of gas in the back I was just going to leave it be and declare that we were allowing that patch to be "free range". I guess I topped of the tank just enough that I actually finished the whole thing.
Okay, I am all cooled off now (after having come in the house and splashed my face with cold water which promptly washed all the sweat into my eyes causing them to sting and tear), and I hear my son stirring. Perfect timing (not so much....). Hope you enjoyed this really verbose way to tell you "I mowed the lawn this afternoon."
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