mow money, mow problems
Actually the title of this post should be the other way round, but I figured if I did that you'd have even less idea what I was talking about. And what I'm talking about is lawn mowers. I got this push reel mower a while ago--for the young folks in the readership, that's a mower without any sort of an engine--but I was unable to make it work fully. It only worked halfly, in that it mowed grass across half of its width; which would be fine if I wanted to go over everything twice. Which I'm not inclined to do, as we have a fair amount of grass here. By dint of much effort and adjustment this afternoon I got the machine into a little better shape, enough to mow a few swatches, but I'm afraid it's still not up to the whole job. It looks like I may have to give in and buy a power mower, and save this one of the edges and tight spots (where, all fairness to it, it really excels). Not that I'm giving up the idea of unpowered lawn care entirely: I still feel like I could manage the whole thing with a perfectly working push mower. Perhaps that creature exists only in my dreams, however; we find that Home Depot (to name one prominent example) now carries nothing but power mowers. Where all too many suburban homeowners now use riding mowers to trim their quarter of an acre, I am clearly in a very small minority here.