Greensleeves

Or more correctly, green feet.

How do you suppose he got green feet?  Do you think it maybe it’s because he was chasing the mower around this afternoon?

Chase it?  Bitch, I DROVE it.

This has been the lousiest Spring I can remember for a long, long time.  Usually, the median temperature for May is a balmy 18 degrees and this year it was 9.  NINE DEGREES.  What suckage!  Also, it has rained and rained and rained … the sun has popped out just long enough to feed the vegetation, but not long enough to dry it out.  That means my lawnmower has been chronically unable to tackle the WAIST HIGH GRASS that is my lawn.  I managed to mow about half of it a couple weeks ago, and it took me 3 hours to do that.  The rest is ridiculous and I can – and do! – lose the dogs in it sometimes.  And don’t even talk to me about my poor vegetable beds.  The weedwhacker died this year and you can’t even reach them for the insanely high weeds and plants surrounding them.

And the poor riding ring, where my agility equipment lives, has been completely overtaken by buttercups.  Oh yes, buttercups – remember when you were a kid, and buttercups were fun?  Yeah, well, now I’m an adult, and I curse them with all the evil thoughts I can muster up.

Oh sure, they make for pretty backdrops

but when they are almost as high as Dextergiraffe, they make for lousy footing in the training ring.

I mean, how are you supposed to train in plant life this high?  Dex thought I’d lowered the jump heights to, like, 10″ or something.

Plus I keep finding dead rats in it (very unpleasant to step on), as the feral leaves them out there as gifts.  Gross.

So today I conquered my fear of the ride-on mower.

Yeah, okay, it’s stupid to be afraid of a lawnmower.  But I have several good reasons for being afraid of this one:

1) it’s not mine, it’s my landlord’s
2) it has like 10 levers, buttons and knobs, none of which make any sense to me
3) I’m afraid of breaking it
4) I looked up the price on line (gulp).

So of course within the first half an hour of using it (to make a crop circle in the lower pasture, because I am practical like that) I broke it.  It just stopped, killed its own engine and refused to start again.  And then I panicked, and pushed it all the way back to where it was originally parked (do you have any idea how heavy these things are??), and decided to never mention that I had used it.  I figured I’d blame the crop circle on aliens, like everyone else does.

Ha ha, you broke the lawnmower!

Shut UP, Wootie!  If you’re so freakin’ smart, YOU drive it!

Whilst I was at it, I also offered to let TWooie drive it.  But as you can see, he does not love the lawnmower.

After lots of grunting and sweating and swearing, I got it parked back where I’d found it.  Then I casually strolled inside to delete any Facebook posts that referred to me using it, just in case they could be used against me in a (small claims) court of law.  But I was pissed off – how come I see dudes mowing on these things all over the place, and I can’t accomplish so much as a trim lawn?  This thought, as well as the depressing fear that I would be doomed to forever tackle the lawns with my regular lawnmower, and the possibility of never being able to use my agility ring again, forced me to go back outside and tinker with the damn thing.

Like many women, I tinker with mechanical things by peering at them, gingerly touching the yucky bits and occasionally prodding the machine with the toe of my sneaker.  I even briefly considered calling BCAA and trying to pass the mower off as my car, so a man in overalls would fix it for me.

And in the end, I am proud to say, I got the thing running again.  And I mowed almost all of the buttercups down in the agility ring.

This is what most of the arena looked like before:

And by the time I was done (and by “done” I mean “ran out of gas”) Dexter was practicing on a thin carpet of grass again.

Praise Jebus!  She accomplished something today!

Shut UP, TWooie!  Or I’ll make you ride the mower again!

TWooie?  TWooie who? I’m not here – you can’t see me; I’m hiding in the bits you didn’t get to finish.

Anyway, that’s my story of accomplishment today.  And it’s also the story of how Tweed got green feet.  Because for some reason, of all my dogs, it’s the senior one that thinks chasing a lawnmower is a good idea.  Clearly, he is not getting smarter with age.  I thought for sure it would be Dexter, who leaves puncture marks in my vacuum cleaner and thus, clearly likes to attack machinery – especially when I ran over a discarded tennis ball and the mower shot the ball like 300 feet into the ether! – but he wasn’t at all interested in interacting the big orange beast.  Eventually I had to put Tweed in a downstay on the porch for his own safety.

What fear have you conquered recently?

In other, unrelated news …

GETTHEBUNNY!GETTHEBUNNY!GETTHEBUNNY! face:

Is there really a bunny or are you just f*ckin’ with us? face(s)

And “I really have no explanation at all for this face” face

All in all, even though it’s not sunny, it hasn’t been a bad day off.  And I get another one tomorrow!  SWEET!  Well, after I go see my physiotherapist.  He says I get to try running on the treadmill tomorrow.  This will be the first time setting foot on it since my accident in February.  I am embarrassingly out of shape.

Treadmills, by the way, are another machine that Dexter likes to attack.

I didn’t do it.  It wasn’t me.  I was just leaving anyway.