I Cut my Grass!

Those of you who know me know that I don't get excited about very much, but this was fun!

[Ok, ok, ok – those of you who really do know me, know that was a joke – those of you who don't will learn that I get excited about dial tone being there every time I pick up the phone…]

Having said that I had a really, really fun time cutting my grass this past weekend!

I don't know if I'm going to be able to convey how much pleasure there is in riding a lawn mower around an acre of land. My side yard is a rectangle – about twice as long as it was wide and was pretty much just grass (no trees to get in the way).

Those of you who've ridden a John Deere Lawn Tractor know exactly what I felt when I engaged the power of a 54" cutting deck and set the height at #3. It was like engaging the afterburner on a fighter jet (I would imagine – I've never actually engaged an afterburner… yet).

When I put the pedal to the metal the tractor started roaring around the lawn leaving a 54" wide path of perfectly cut grass. (Just a note to those of you who haven't done this yet – you really shouldn't watch the grass behind you for very long – it's the stuff in front of you that you really need to pay attention to. You've been warned). The cutting deck spat out enough grass every second to fill a green garbage bag with grass clippings! Yikes!

I was sitting there just doing loops around my side yard when I realized that I'm going to run into a turning radius problem shortly. Hmmm. What am I going to do about that?

That's when all those trips to the hockey arena to watch my brother play paid off again. The Zamboni! It has the same problem! We can apply the Zamboni-Solution to this Turning Radius Problem.

My next pass I went straight down the middle of my side yard and then started looping as if I was smoothing ice rather than cutting grass.

The solution was perfect! (Aside from that little incident at the start when I was admiring my work rather than getting it straight in front of me – oh well).

Now – I suspect that at some point the novelty will wear off, but I'm sort of hoping that it won't. If you cut your acres of grass with a riding mower and know that the novelty will wear off – I don't want to hear from you. Thank you.    

P.S. here's a satellite image of our place. The teensy-weensy white rectangle at the end of the driveway is our 64x24' barn. The rest is lawn. It's a good thing that Nothing Runs like a Deere!