Spring is Upon Us

So I was trying to wait until it warmed up some, but not to the point where it was going to get hot. There wasn’t much in-between, though. I cut down a tree for firewood last Saturday. It was a big chestnut oak. A big one.

Dad helped get it up into my yard – he pulled it with the tractor. He was able to pull the whole thing into the yard, but once it got on the softer ground it needed to be cut in 3 pieces before he could get it to where I needed it so I could cut it up, split and stack it.

Becky and I worked on that for a little while last night after I got home. I haven’t done much manual labor over the Winter – I’m not used to it at all! Maybe after I work on firewood for a few weeks I’ll get into a little bit better shape.

I’m about to make an admission now about something stupid I’ve done, and have learned a lesson the hard (and expensive!) way. Last year, I neglected to check/change the oil in my riding mower. Some of you already see where this is going. Yep, it finally caught up with me and the motor seized on me. I added some oil back in and had to force the motor by hand to turn some so I could work the oil back in and get it started again.

I mowed the yard a couple of times without incident after that. But that 3rd time it really caught up with me. I’m not a motor-head, so I don’t know technically what happened, but I can say all the insides started making a racket and something let go. There’s a hole in the side of the motor about the size of a golf ball.

We only needed to mow one more time after that, so we borrowed Mom & Dad’s riding mower. Wouldn’t you know, one of the belts broke. So we gave up on mowing the rest of the yard and decided to make another go of it this Spring.

When I ruined the motor in my mower, I looked online to see how much it was going to hurt my wallet to replace it. All of the prices I found were pushing $1,000 by the time I paid shipping & taxes. Once I noticed the weather was warming up, I remembered I needed to do something about our yard. I looked online again and found a motor for roughly $630 shipped. It’s on its way to my house now. Hopefully I can get it changed this weekend and actually get my yard mowed.

So yes, I’ve learned a lesson. I’m learning overall to be more disciplined about different things, whether it be finances, maintenance or whatever. I’m finding it to be less stressful and less expensive.