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Published May 4, 1997
By Tim Wood As anyone with a lawn knows, this is the time of year for cutting grass, pulling weeds, spreading fertilizer and other assorted chemicals.
On weekends and weekday afternoons, warriors take up arms to do battle with the grass. Some aspire to have beautiful lawns; I aspire to keep from getting kicked out of the neighborhood.
As a public service, I hereby present my list of "How to know when it's time to cut the grass:"
1. Your neighbor has mowed his lawn and it looks like a putting green, compared to the forest that your lawn has become.
2. Kids come up to your door and ask if you would like them to mow your lawn - for a price.
3. Your spouse starts reminding you.
4. Inspectors from the city hang around your house, looking up old ordinances about clean neighborhoods.
5. You find snakes and other types of undesirable life in your yard.
After laziness and allergies, the next obstacle to mowing grass is having a working lawn mower. As much as I would like to buy a new lawn mower each spring, that's not financially feasible, nor is it good management.
After I went through a series of unreliable lawn mowers, a neighbor back in Texas gave me an old lawn mower. He had bought a new one and didn't need his old one.
This happened when my main lawn mower had been in not one shop, but two shops. If your lawn mower needs repair, have it done in December. Unfortunately, most of us are not that far-sighted.
If you wait until the grass starts growing, you will find that 2,000 other people also have waited and your mower will not be fixed until after the millennium.
The first shop (in Texas) did a poor repair job, which led me to take the mower back. There it sat for several weeks, until I got mad, picked it up and took it to another repair shop, which performed the exact same repairs that the first shop claimed it did. However, the mower did run well after that.
It was during this time that the friend gave me the mower. So, I ended up with not one, but two operating lawn mowers, and promptly loaned the backup to a friend whose mower had gone down.
The new mower worked wonderfully. Unfortunately, the backup mower died again and now awaits a trip to the junkyard. All was well until late last summer, when the no. 1 mower did not suffer a motor malfunction, but instead a broken height adjustment lever.
Naturally, I waited until this spring to get it fixed. Then, it turned out, replacement parts were hard to find. The local dealer for this brand of lawn mower had no record of it in their parts files.
It seemed as if the mower might have come through a space-time continuum and actually had been manufactured in an alternative universe; hence the lack of part numbers.
I spent two hours one Saturday running back and forth between the mower and the dealer trying to identify the damaged part.
However, there was a space-age solution to the problem: the Internet.
It turned out that the manufacture of the beleaguered mower had a web page and an e-mail address. I fired off an impassioned e-mail, asking for help in locating parts for this mower. They responded by sending a FAX with a parts diagram and a contact number. It turned out that the mower had been manufactured in 1980. To some people, that is another space-time continuum.
The local dealer took this information and ordered the parts, and soon I'll have all of them and be able to get the old mower. In the meantime, a friend has loaned me a mower, so there is no excuse to avoid cutting the grass.
For years I wondered why some people had multiple lawn mowers. One friend had six. Backup lawn mowers help you mow the grass when the primary won't go. They are also a good source of spare parts.
Last summer, before my mowers arrived via movers from Texas, I did buy a lawn mower to cut grass then and also serve as my back-up mower.
This mower has its disadvantages, but there is one great advantage to it: it always starts.
Now, a lawn mower that always starts is every grass cutter's dream. Lawn mower companies would love to market such a mower.
But there is one catch to this amazing machine: it has no engine. It is an old-fashioned push mower, or reel mower, which relies on the person pushing it for power.
It doesn't cut as well as a power mower, although it does provide a good workout. At the very least, you will not throw your shoulder out trying to start it.
You would think that someone would invent a grass retardant to keep folks from having to mow grass so often. But then we wouldn't have the adventures of keeping lawn mowers running and that satisfaction of seeing a freshly-cut lawn - and having a mammoth allergy attack.
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