What an awesome Saturday

Man…  I just had a GREAT Saturday.  One of the best I’ve had in a long time.  First off, I slept in till 1030am.  That, in and of itself, elevates today far above any other saturday in recent history.  Then, I got the itch to be productive.  Since I didn’t have any kids to worry about, I was free to flex my awesome.

 

First on the todo list was to mow.  However, my lawnmower blade needed sharpening.  In order to sharpen it, I needed a work surface of some kind.  Several years back, my father-in-law bought me a neat little portable work bench thing that was perfect.  It was still in the box in my garage.  I decided to go ahead and bust it out.  So, I spent a little while assembling that thing.  Then, once it was put together I got the blade off the mower and broke out the dremel to sharpen it up.

The whole time I was sharpening the blade, the mower was on its side.  Turns out, it was on the WRONG side.  When I fired up the mower, which normally runs great, it started belching out huge cloud of blue-grey smoke.  Smoke that color means oil is burning.  When I popped open the air filter, I realized that because it had been laying on its side, oil and gasoline has leaked down into the air filter and now oil was getting sucked into the engine.  The filter itself was pretty dirty, so, I started calling around to see who might carry an air filter for a small honda engine.  I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.  Turns out, the advance auto parts right down the street had a filter that, while not technically for a small honda engine, worked just perfectly.

So, $8 later, I was back home putting the mower back together to mow our extremely overgrown lawn (I’ve been lazy lately).  With the new air filter in place, the mower ran great again.  In fact, between sharpening the blade and replacing the air filter, the mower ran stronger than it has in years.  I was actually expecting the mower to stall a few times (the grass was really bad).  Instead, it happily chewed through everything with nary a complaint.  It felt like I’d just bought a new mower for $8, which is a pretty good deal.

Lawn sufficiently cut, I decided it was time to get really crazy.  I got out the saws-all and attacked a couple of tree branches.  We have a beautiful cherry tree in our front lawn that I really love…  but a few of its branches were long and low enough that they interfered with parking my car in certain spots on the driveway.  So, me and the sawsall ripped through them in a few minutes and then I gave the same treatment to the river birch in the back yard that had a few low branches that were just a little too big.

Mandy had asked that I pull the weeds in the front flower bed, so I did that real quick.  I decided that was about enough productivity and I was getting pretty tired, so, I started cleaning up.  I was cleaning in my garage when I looked up and saw a dog wondering down the sidewalk.  I was expecting to see an owner walking behind him, but, no one ever showed up.  I walked out of the garage to see if anyone was on the street with the dog and there didn’t seem to be.  The dog came right up to me and was pretty friendly.  He had a color and a registration tag, so, I took him into the garage and called the local animal control folks.  They had a phone number for the one time owners, but, the number no longer worked.  So, me and this little dog hopped in the car and I took him to the animal shelter.  Hopefully his owners find him soon.

Once I got back home from that, it was time to get ready.  For what, you ask?  Get this: a double date!  Some friends of our were equally without child for the weekend so we decided to do dinner and a movie with them.  It was a lot of fun.  We saw The Proposal, which was surprisingly good in that predictable romantic-comedy sort of way.

 

All-in-all, it was an AWESOME Saturday.  I’m thinking about suggesting a winter session for Camp Nana.