It’s no secret that we have been rescaling our lifestyle while I continue to look for work. One of the latest victims of our budget cuts was our landscaper Jose. I talked a little about him in an earlier post, so I will leave it at that.

We let him go at the end of August and it is now mid-September. It is a good thing that things are relatively dormant because I haven’t done anything in the meantime. The fire danger precluded the use of power tools. I have been watering the grass to get some seeds started and with the cooler weather, the lawn is really greening up again.

I actually found the grass (and ground) to be really wet, so I turned off the sprinklers for the year. That made mowing a chore as the bag was getting filled with one trip around the yard. Another bit of fun is the Hazardous air quality caused me to do this with an N95 mask. It was hard to breath with the mask on and not safe to work without it.

The mower is an OK unit, it was a cast-off John Deere that was given to my son to try and make some money but it is small (21″ deck) an is not self-propelled. It worked fine though once I finally got it started. I have no idea how old the oil is or how sharp the blade is. I traded my string trimmer for canning jars years ago so I will be on the lookout for an inexpensive or used replacement. For now, I will live without it. My blower is still not working even though I tore it apart.

I plugged into my podcasts and got to work. It wasn’t the glorious start to my new responsibilities as I quite expected with squishy feet and puffing through the mask. I really don’t mind doing yardwork but honestly I will need to make a mental shift from only doing the things that I want to do to keeping up with routine maintenance, especially the weeds in the flower bed. Those can get overwhelming quickly.

I have always enjoyed the leaf season. It is probably because I don’t have a lot of trees that drop leaves, but getting out after the cooler weather sets in and exerting some constructive energy is therapeutic. I am also looking forward to pruning the roses properly next year. If I don’t cut down the apple tree, saving the water shoots for more smoking fodder as well. I think it will be good to get the kids involved in the work for character building.

The calculus was always paying Jose for one to two hours a week was much more efficient use of money and time as this took me an hour and a half just to mow the grass. I can remember spending weeks weeding just the front flower bed. Now, my time is free and money is harder to come by. Now, looking forward to raking some leaves soon.