Adaptive Curmudgeon

The Damn Lawn Is Going To Kill Me

[It has been several weeks… the lawn is shifting from Serengeti to Taiga. It doesn’t take long before nature sees the vacuum you’ve left.]

My lawn has been a struggle forever. I’ve got limited man hours and equipment to throw at the situation. I just can’t keep up. (Note: Curmudgeon Compound doesn’t have a pussy 1/10th acre manicured, irrigated, postage stamp like suburbanites. Nor is it “landscaping”.)

I have a couple acres that’s a demilitarized zone keeping the forest at bay. It’s huge and necessary but I don’t like wasting time on it. I just want the grass ankle length and that’s all that matters. I need to keep weeds, trees, bugs, forest fires, vermin, and communists from getting too close to my house. I don’t want to hear about some weak little battery powered outdoor Roomba in the comments; that shit might fly on a suburban tabletop of recently laid sod but my lawn will grab something like that and beat it to death.

I used to mow with my 1944 Ford 2n. Alas, it’s perpetually broke. Such a shame because it’s a joy to drive; slow and grand and smooth, fuel efficient and not too loud. With a decrepit old John Deere finish mower on the 3 point, it does a good looking job too (but only if I don’t let the grass get too deep). The real Achilles heel is that the old Ford takes X hours maintenance for every Y hours seat time and I just can’t spare it. (Ironically, I’ve discovered a 75 year old Ford probably takes less maintenance than a 6 year old Cub Cadet.)

Realizing I was tilting at windmills relying on a 75 year old machine for “production work” I caved. I bought a new Cub Cadet mower. Everyone congratulated me on my “realistic” solution to the perpetual lawn issue. “Hey, Curmudgeon, nice to see you finally bought a mower like a normal human instead of going on a vision quest. Isn’t life easier that way?”

NO! It’s not easier at all!

It’s easier for one year. A bit easier the second year. And then a long slow swirling of the drain until you think buying another piece of shit to replace your current piece of shit makes sense… and then the cycle starts again.

My riding mower has just one job and it has always sucked at it. (Actually its true job is to extract money from dumbasses… and it’s damn good at that.) The design is pure early 21st century disposajunk. (All mowers are similar. They all come from the same few factories with large overlaps in parts.. They’re all shit and the only variance is a few percent here and there.)

Specifically I hate the overrevved engine. It’s a Kawasaki that’s reliable and has plenty of power but it shrieks like a badger on crack getting beaten with bagpipes. That unholy racket harshes my mellow. Plus the mower (and all mowers) sports “lawyer-drive”. Lest some pinhead get hurt, the thing is designed to mechanically limit itself. It could high center on tick-tack. It’s perpetually bitching at me if I back up. If I shift in my seat it shuts down. I apparently live in a land of people who are always thinking of jumping off their shrieking POS mower and diving under the deck while it’s still spinning.

All those complaints apply when it’s functioning, a low bar beneath which it never fails to dive. It started taking a dump starting about year 2. I faithfully maintained it but there’s only so much you can do with a modern mower. Especially the damn deck… which is too expensive to replace and pretty flimsy for it’s intended purpose. It’s currently broke, broke not too long after I got it, whenever I fixed it it’d break again in 10-15 hours, it ate belts like a stoner with the munchies, had a mower deck made of hope, and pretty much annoyed me in expensive ways throughout it’s miserable lifespan.

This spring the repair guy started hinting that “they’re not made to last very long anyway”. I pushed the infernal shitbox into a corner of the garage and went camping.

No way in hell am I taking another ride on the failure train. One should never spend money with a business or product class that treats you like shit.

Soon… very soon… I’ll be applying a new solution. I’m gonna throw money at this situation and go big. I tried old, I tried normal, and now I’m going for Plan C: nuke it from space.

Stay tuned.

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