Life is a State of Mind

I must be dreaming. Three days in a row with no need to close windows nor run the air-conditioning. Gorgeous weather, can it really be August near Washington?

Temperatures are still getting up to 90 in the afternoon, but there is so little humidity that it’s comfortable to be active, work, or even exercise without being drenched in sweat in a few minutes. Very unusual, very welcome. The cats have been enjoying more outside time with us, and I have been pulling weeds and doing a little yard work. Erci is still prepping for her RHCE/RHCT class and exam, and writing papers for her MBA financial class. Yesterday she got out for a couple hours of errands and I enjoy turning the music up and catching up on some house-cleaning.

Scott get’s pedantic for audio geeks after the fold…
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Katchmark came out and gave an estimate to fix the roof leak. At least it is going to get fixed in the next week or two, but it is not cheap.

Broken pool baskets replaced too, yippea! Pool Boys (the company) rocks.

Nice gentleman from A&E repair came out and fixed the dishwasher this morning. It turns out that the Fisher&Paykel DishDrawers do not use a water level sensor, but they measure drag on the impeller to know if enough water is in the drawer to start the wash cycle. Our impeller was busted, spun too easily, and the drawer never thought it had any water. New (quite expensive) impeller fixed the problem in minutes. Yay!

More nervous about roof leak repair…

Make an effort to listen to Jonathan Coulton’s “First of May” from “Smoking Monkey” album, it is guaranteed to make you smile. Oh, if you are at work, use headphones; it may be NSFW in some offices.

While I was laid up with the nasty coughing flu, the seasons delivered great beauty to our back yard.

Only the last five photos are from this past weekend, others are from earlier this season.

Erci and I have some pretty amazing good fortune/karma lately. We came home from work to find all the lights on (a feature of our lights is that events can trip an ALL-ON signal to all the X-10 controllers in the house and turn on all the lights). Typically this is from the alarm being tripped, but the alarm was not tripped. Nor had we lost power (sometimes the brown-out will cause the X-10 controllers to think they got a signal).

A little annoyed we went around shutting off lights, which meant we paid a visit to the laundry room (that we ordinarily have not been to until the next round of laundry in a few days). There was a mysterious hissing noise and that turned out to be a leaking washer hose! No puddle yet, it had apparently just started leaking!

She suggested we shut off the water, finish our dinner while it was hot, then fix the plumbing. Calm Sutragirl. Great idea. After some pretty good take-out Thai food from Grand Thai and Sushi (606 and 50), we got out the necessary tools and fixed the hose connections. She rocks…

I am thinking of a month ago when I caught the 30 gallon fish tank just starting to leak, and I am very thankful both leaks were caught so soon, before any real damage happened.

Last Friday morning, after several days of research into my choices, I ordered a new Ariens Mini Zoom 1540 riding lawn mower from Lawn & Leisure of Sterling, VA. Joel at Lawn & Leisure was very helpful and applied no high pressure sales tactics. Buying any riding, rotary mower was hard for me to do. I wanted to do something more environmentally friendly, but I have about 2 acres of yard to mow regularly, and though I can mow it all with a manual reel push mower (did it last weekend, took 9 hours over three days), I want to get it done much faster. I’ve been using the ancient Sears Craftsman 4hp 22″ self propelled walk behind we bought used in 1996, but it is literally falling to pieces (one of the drive wheels has been broken for years, but now a second wheel is falling off and it leaks gas). That mower was taking me around 5 hours to do the whole 2 acres, again not exactly timely.

I looked at and almost ordered a Quick 36 Fox (36″ self-propelled walk behind), but Erci pointed out that at roughly $2000 she’d be happier if whatever mower we bought could do a few other things, such as tow a cart or spreader. She is of course, correct - but that Quick 36 does look like an excellent choice for people who need to mow 1-3 acres of hilly ground with lots of obstructions and no need to tow a cart around.

We considered a John Deere L 100 series lawn tractor, which also looks like a pretty good deal. The theory is that we’ll be able to mow the lawn in half the time with the zero turn from Ariens though, and time is precious.

I plan to further cut the time down by buying a small Pro Mow gang of reels to tow behind the rider. The reels do a better job of cutting grass than any rotary mower would, and the wide swath will allow us to cut in just a few sweeps and with less gas than the normal deck, which will still be available just in case the weeds take over (weeds are tough on reel mowers).

I wish someone made a small gang of perhaps 3 reels I could push around by hand, that would have made the rider unessential. I really like the little 18″ Brill Lexus 38 I have (and intend to still use it inside our fence (about 1/10th of an acre). It is quiet, clean, easy, and cuts beautifully… it is just too small to tackle the big field with.

Looking forward to playing with the Ariens when it arrives.