Knotted Up

Carrie wanted to mow Friday.

"I need to dump the poop and put the lines back up first," I said.

Carrie agreed and then drove right over them. 

I heard her coming as I was dumping the back of the gator. I ran out of the woods just in time to see the look on her face. She'd thought she'd given enough clearance, but the lines were further out than she had reckoned. 

I asked Carrie to hitch the gator up to the trailer. She's a doer and needed a job (It helped that I could honestly say, "You're better at that than me, so you should do it."). We needed to see under the mower. It was too heavy to lift and the clearance too low to work under. Once the trailer was hitched, I let down the ramp and asked Carrie to drive partway up. It was just enough of an angle for us to access the mess.

And it was a mess. The polywire is tough stuff. It has metal laced into it and was spun machine tight. The right blade had the most, but the center blade had polywire smashed between the blade and mounting. The obvious solution was to undo the bolt, remove the blade, and then the polywire. We didn't have a lift to get it, though, so I did what I could by hand.

I recommended taking it to the shop. Carrie was upset and wanted to forge on ahead. The blades started when she turned them on, but they made an unhealthy racket (and scared the pets!). Carrie zipped around the yard for a little while, but noticed that the grass was hardly cutting evenly. When she realized that the center blade was seized she decided it really was time to take the mower.

Carrie hitched the truck to the trailer, loaded the mower, and drove off to the dealership. It's an hour away, so it's a time investment. When she arrived, the dropped the blades, sharpened them, removed the wire, and sent her back on her merry way. It took about 3 hours with travel.

Meanwhile, the lines blocking our dumping area are done for. The bottom two handles are destroyed and we'll need more line to replace what was lost.

Which we conveniently have a lot of. Carrie asked me to remove the bottom line of our electric fencing. Plants ground it out and we couldn't mow the plants for fear of the line tangling in the mower, so it was my project of the day. Kila helped.

We have a lot of fencing. Every hour, I'd take the dogs out for 20 to 30 minutes. They'd run and play while I worked. Then they got to go back in before they overheated.

I finished over the course of two days. Now we have loads of wire and more than enough spare handles to replace what the mower ate. Carrie came in behind me and it let her mow the fence line better in the dry lots.

All of the irony of the situation was not lost on us. We predicted exactly what would happen and then we followed through making it happen. The planned "honey-do" project will help with the clean-up. It was a pain, but we recovered. I think we handled the pain in a way that affirmed the marriage. We were upset in the moment, but we communicated, took action together, got things handled, and talked about it later. I'm not going to say it started without strain, but learning how to work through things as a team is a big deal in married life. I would have loved for Shane to have noticed, but he was inside and mostly oblivious! I filled him in, so hopefully some learning was accomplished. He was focused on finishing his chores to earn electronics.