Change of Seasonal machinery

Started out the day with a mission in mind.

I'm not much of a "doer" on my days off, but I seldom have more than two days off in a row, and I get pretty twitchy on days like this -- it's my fourth in a row. Today's mission: the changing of the seasonal machinery. To wit: putting the lawnmower away and breaking out the snowmobiles for the upcoming sledding-and-drinking season.

The lawnmower is the easiest part, in that it has electric start. I have a zero-turn Everride Warrior -- a commercial-sized rider that cuts a 5-foot swath through my suburban jungle. I changed the oil, greased it up, stabilized the fuel for the winter, and rode it around the neighborhood to get all the new oil circulated and the fuel and stabilizer mixed. I rode it over to my neighbor Kent's house, where he was working on one of his race cars. (He's independently wealthy, retired at a jealousy-inducing age, and owns several cars and bikes.) Talked some shit about raccoons and skunks -- you know, the usual chitchat. He caught the neighbor's cat in his raccoon trap last week. We laughed about it -- we both hate that cat cause it hunts the songbirds -- then I put my Stetson back on, jingled my spurs and rode on home. (Or maybe it was just a Bass Pro-Shop baseball cap.)

I had shut off the fuel valve and planned to drive the mower into the garage just as the engine died -- with a dry carburetor. But it ran out of fuel before I even got back to my driveway, so I sat in the road, cranking away like a doofus, until it started again. The best laid plans, eh? Got her parked in the garage, where it will serve as a mouse condo until next spring.

Took a few minutes to watch Mike Rowe wrangle some alligators on Dirty Jobs. I love that show. I've had a few of those jobs in the past, but for the last few years I just watch my workers handle the shit end of the stick while I stay in the truck and do crossword puzzles. But as my mentor Tommy Fawkes often said, "The cream always rises to the top," to which I would always add "Yeah, but so does the slag..."

So next up, the snowmobiles. This will be the torture test... starting them requires some 20 or 40 pulls on the starter cords. I dislocated my shoulder a few months ago, and did a month of rehab to fix the damage to my rotator (sp?) cuff. You can't really pull the cord with your right hand, so my recently-recovered left shoulder will be put on the testing block. We'll see if the doctors and the physical therapists earned the money they got.

If not, I'll name them all in my next blog.