Hot Smoking Grass

One hesitates to devolve to discussion of the weather, but it’s gone jungly here, temps bumping the 90s and air like wet feathers.  Speaking of which, we are making sure the ducks and chickens have plenty of water and shade, and the daily ritual of hosing down the pigs and watching them flop in the wallow has begun.  Good fun.

Christened the new mower (push style, no self-propelled, must not weaken the next generation) yesterday by changing the oil (after the third tank of new gas, dump the iron filings).  Wasn’t sure how much of the oil can to dump in there, so kept checking the dip stick.  Was mowing right along (one of the reasons I disdain self-propelled mowers is that you must mow at the speed dictated by the machine [and thus the government, since they’ve now officially throttled the things for our safety] [it was a revelation to me when the lawn mower salesman said mower blades are no longer allowed to exceed a certain RPM…this is the kind of gummint “protection” that sends a guy to the garage to rummage around for his Don’t Tread on Me flag] [I have a certain brother-in-law, who — given five minutes, a pair of pliers, and based on the brief exchange we shared over popcorn last Sunday evening — can do a little number that will jack that mower back up to helicopter speed] and when I mow I want to get it over with, not stroll along behind a machine proceeding at a pace calculated in some Washington D.C. cubicle) (as my brother Jed said the other night at the same popcorn feast, “Mowin’ the lawn is a timed event.”)…

OK, gotta start over because I lost control of all those ( ) and [ ]’s.

So I’m mowing away at race-walk pace and things were going clippingly when suddenly the mower set to smoking horribly, bad-looking gray puffs of smoke coming out all over the place.  I shut’er down fast and kinda backed away.

Figured out the problem pretty quick which is when you push a running mower up a sidehill and you have failed to replace the dipstick, you create a hot oil fountain and as the oil leaks and sizzles and smokes and you stand there in the greasy mists of toxicity you realize that let’s say burning hot smoke off a lawn mower causes brain damage you can breathe easy because apparently you didn’t have that much to work with in the first place.

Yep.