Spring in Suburbia, Part II

Lest I didn't make it so clear in Part I, two posts down, I despise suburban lawns, and I particularly despise my own being drafted to maintain such a lawn.

So you can imagine how utterly thankful I am that I survived this past week, which was hell in that department. The old mower had been scraping on the ground in a way that it oughtn't after I posted Part I, and so it had been in the shop since the beginning of the month. Fifteen days later, when the grass had grown taller than the dogs, we got on the horn with the shop, and, after a brief exchange, we told them to keep the old one, and went in search of a new one. We chose a store on the polar opposite end of our twin towns, and from it a mower with an electric start up (to replace our old mower's "pull"-start). Two or three drives back and forth to the store — me as a nerve-wracked passenger in my father's stick-shift car, I might add, which I have not learned to drive, and Father ain't so hot at driving it either — essentially taught us ⒜ that the handle is set by default to be right where it can stop the blade dead, ⒝ any time the blade can't move, it causes a chain reaction that means we have to go back to the store and replace a part that allows the electric start to work, and ⒞ that means that the simplest clog results in the thing being dead until we get that part replaced every time. Two days and all of my mother's hysteria over the matter later, we traded it in. Simple pull-start mowers from here for us. And even with the new mower, the tall, thick grass that had grown over some eighteen spring days took hours to mow. And despite the gloves, my hands hadn't been that sore since the Edible Arrangements gig in Nashville with all the pineapple.

But, yay, finished stuff! At least until the grass grows back again. And my mother isn't hysterical about the lawn anymore. But not to worry; she'll find more things to be hysterical about. The terminal lack of employment among my father and myself, for instance. Or my magically vanishing eyebrows that she claims will cement my joblessness. (Will it?) Or whether what my father's set to record on the DVR will override what she wants to record. Or whether we failed to do some minor household task during the given afternoon. Ah, well; time to go somewhere else for a while.

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Meanwhile, this past day in Cyberspace: A tornado wiped out an Oklahoma City suburb, Ray Manzarek touched the earth at 74, and Grumpy Cat is enjoying all the bad news. As tired as I am of all the Grumpy Cat (aka Tardar Sauce) memes, I can quite see her way sometimes.

Here's the late Manzarek with the Valedictorian, paying tribute to his old band. (By the way, more music and multimedia on my other blog, Lucy Dream!)