How Not To Mow 2 Acres

It's been about 10 years since I mowed these 2 acres we live on. The land is basically flat with tough pasture grass and pines with large roots exposed in places. I did the weed eating and then did the main cutting with a 19.5 horsepower Craftsman mower. It's not fancy but it does get the job done quickly. Anyway, I was near the end of mowing when I heard a horrible clanging sound and the mower quit. Checking under the mower I found that I had bent one of the blades on a tree root. I had to get another set of blades and put them on. The moral of this story is to raise the mowing height when working around large roots and other exposed items on the surface. After the blade change I checked the belts and did a test cutting. All went well. By the end of the summer I will have saved enough money not hiring our former lawn guy to pay for the mower as well as the gass for this season. I think they call this 'sweat equity'.

On a similar note I have been doing what I can to economize. Finances here are going to be tight as most of my years of investments are in the toilet until the market rises again. I will get about 40% of my teaching salary and will supplement it with interest off of investments. For the next year or so the investments won't be much help so it is time to watch my pennies. I have been looking closer at coupons for grocery shopping and avoiding extravagant purchases. I also need in the next week to start switching invested funds to CDs and other stable sources. The problem right now is that the typical CD is now paying around 2% interest. Hopefully that wlll improve. Until the market improves I am pretty much holding on to my stock funds and bonds and just transferring money from bonds as they mature to other sources.

Henry David Thoreau With Lawn Tools (not!)

It's been a long time since I've done any major yard work. My teaching duties just took up too much of my time and energy to allow for taking care of the 2 acres we live on. Therefore it was with some excitement and a little trepidation that I signed for the implements of destruction commonly called lawn tools that we ordered recently. The lawn tractor did not want to start at first but with a little coaxing and swearing the engine finally kicked over with a huge belch of white smoke. Once the initial theatrics were over it ran great. I drove it up into the shed and then unpacked the weed eater and chain saw. Yesterday afternoon was spent mostly going over all of the booklets. We have a medium sized tree that fell a month ago so I decided to slice it into manageable pieces that could be tossed onto the brush pile in back. I ran through the startup procedures with the chain saw and cranked it. And cranked it. And cranked it. I cranked until my shoulder was sore. It finally started up and I proudly took it over to the fallen tree. Unfortunately I forgot about the safety switch on it and when I released the throttle momentarily it died. I proceeded to flood it and pulled on the starting handle for about 30 minutes until I was gasping for breath. By this time the mosquitoes had found me so I called it a day and put the chainsaw away. Last night I went back to the manual and discovered a couple of things I was doing wrong. This morning I tried to start it again and after about 20 pulls it started up. This time I did not let it stall and cut the tree up in about 15 minutes. Though covered with wood chips I did keep my body parts intact. This outdoors stuff isn't as easy as the guy on the PBS home show makes it look! I'm sure that with experience I will get better at it.

Lots of work and a little more teacher stuff

We spent the morning cleaning 15 years of junk out of the utility shed. It's being cleaned in preparation for mowing stuff. I have been paying someone to keep the 2 acres of yard trimmed but with what I pay him in one year I can get all of equipment I need and do it myself now that I have the time and energy. This afternoon we purchased a riding mower, chain saw, and weed eater. Yee hah!

I know I promised to end the teaching posts but something came up that I just have to blog about. This past Sunday the local paper posted a list of all school retirees. It even had several interviews with the teachers. Guess who was the only person not listed? Yep, you got it in one guess. I emailed the Human Resource person in charge of retirees about it. She wrote me back apologizing, saying she would send me an invitation to the retirement dinner I did not get and a listing of my jobs in the county. It would have been nice to have actually attended the dinner and had the information published in the paper. It crossed my mind that the superintendent of schools has been pretty pissed off about remarks I've made in the past on my teaching blog about things happening at the school that he seemed to feel reflected badly upon him. He even had his hired law firm threaten me with legal action if I did not remove a funny video I posted concerning the pitiful ESIS grading program we were forced to use after the school system spent a huge amount of money for this program that would not even correctly average grades at times. The supposed reason for the threat was that I allegedly used a proprietary photo of their sacred ESIS program in my video parody. Would you say that he was looking for absolutely anything to use in retaliation against me for my posts telling the truth? Surely he has a better character than that so it must have just been a coincidence. Would he also be so petty as to have my name removed from the published retirement list or am I just imagining things? Hmmm... no one else I am aware of was left off of the list, so why was I the only one? I'm sure it was just an honest error. Aren't you certain as well? Of course you are. Isn't educational politics an interesting sport? Now that I am not affiliated with the school system any longer I will have more freedom to post an occasional tidbit to keep the educational system honest. I talk regularly to a number of teachers so I'm sure I will be hearing all sorts of interesting things during the upcoming school year and I will be more than happy to verify them and then pass them along on this blog as time permits. I know how much the "powers that be" at the St. Johns County, Florida school system value the truth so I look at this as a public service on their behalf, though it will certainly not be the main focus of this blog.