utenzi

A sure sign you need to mow your yard is when rabbits can hide in the grass, This rabbit is doing a half way decent job of staying under cover. I'm going out right now to take away all that lovely grass. He can always go to the back yard and have a meal there. It's too damn hot to mow the entire yard so I'll settle for the front third.

All summer long the area I live in has been in a bad drought. Not the greater RTP area, though they are a little short of usual, but just an area maybe 5 or 6 miles on each side. I only mowed my yard something like 4 times during June, July, August and early September. Now that the weather is cooling and rain isn't as crucial it's raining every third day. WTF? I mowed last Saturday and already it needs it again. I spent 90 minutes out there mowing after work tonight and there's still an hours worth left to do. Since it's supposed to rain tomorrow afternoon I doubt I'll be able to do it. I can't mow very early in the morning due to the dew. So the first thing I'll be doing is to scoot into Chapel Hill between 8 and 9am to dose my mice, then wander over to Umstead Park to do the Company Mill trail (5.5 miles) then drop off some stuff at Julie's house that she forgot here (a task I've managed to procrastinate on for 2 months now). Then it's back t

That suicide pact I mentioned the other day isn't limited to just deer. Apparently bunnies want in on it also. I was mowing the lawn this evening and that bunny you see on the left almost got run over. I was using a 6.5 hp gas mower so it was quite loud but that rabbit didn't move a muscle. I was only one row away from the furry critter before I noticed it. This time, unlike the deer, I remembered to take a picture. Oddly enough, as soon as the flash went off that rabbit took off across my yard and then the guy's yard behind me. But think about it. This rabbit stayed put during multiple passes of my loud lawn mower, as close as 2 feet away, it also stayed there while I went into my house and got my camera--but when it knew I was taking a picture... off it went. Pretty weird. This was the next critter to catch my eye while mowing. It was only a few minutes after I took the picture of the rabbit that I passed this lovely girl. And since I have a thing for bugs--I had to take

Isn't this critter pretty? I wonder what giraffes think of NC winters? It's got to feel unnatural to them. Today was very sunny and in the high 70s so I'm sure Mr Giraffe was much happier today than last week. There were two things on my agenda for today. Going to the NC Zoo in Asheboro and picking up a new lawn mower. I only got one of those things done. As you can probably tell from the picture above, I did make it to the zoo. Ren and I got there late due to someone oversleeping--apparently she had a bad reaction to BSE and just didn't want to wake up--so we got to the zoo, which is an hour drive from where I live, at 10:45am. We stayed until closing at 5pm so we were on our feet continuously for 6 hours. Our aching dogs! My feet were killing me and Ren was feeling the same way. The accumulated sun exposure from the 6 hours also sapped our endurance. Getting old! This is also why that mower stayed in the store. We just didn't feel like stopping anywhere on the way

Not much happened with me this weekend. I wasn't feeling well on Saturday so I just hung around the house. My only venture out was to go get 5 gallons of gasoline for my mowers. A little while after that I mowed a small segment of my yard with my old mower. I was quite surprised it still worked--but it did. The poor thing is so beat up the wheels are all "bow-legged" due to metal fatigue in the mowing deck. Friday night I went to Lowe's and Wal-mart to compare lawn mowers. I think I'll get a self propelled model from Lowe's that costs $340 but I haven't actually bought it yet. It'll certainly make things a lot easier on my lower back and probably decrease the time it takes to mow my lawn by around 45 minutes. It currently takes me over 3 hours and I'd really like to drop that down closer to two hours. Mowing a lawn is really great exercise but as I get older I seem to crave exercise that involves lots of sweating in sweltering weather less and less