Springing into it

I closed all 3 Activity Rings yesterday.
That's very rare these days.

It’s Spring in New Zealand, and my lawns have really started growing, so I had to mow them. That’ll be my fate roughly every two weeks from now until probably April of next year.

Winter was colder this year than last, and that meant that the grass grew very slowly over the past few months, unlike last year, which was a warmer and mild winter. A few weeks ago, the grass started growing again, but the ongoing winter rains made the grass too heavy to mow. Until yesterday. And today.

Yesterday was the second of two sunny days in a row (!), so I decided to go for it, starting with the back because it was longer, and I figured that would mean it would take two goes to finish, and it did. We may have had two days of sunshine, but after a wet winter and cool temperatures persisting, the grass was gluggy. Still, I go it done, and all that sunshine meant that the battery was recharged (twice…) on solar power alone. Win!!!

Today I mowed the front "lawn" (I put that it in quote marks because the front is more weeds than lawn). The sun was shining at the time so I was able to recharge the battery on solar power—before it got mostly cloudy.

Both days it was kinda Spring-like outside today, but only 15 degrees (59F) when I was mowing, so still a little cooler than I'd like. The temperatures were too cool to mow without wearing something warm, but being in the sun, and being uncharacteristically physically active meant that I sweat quite a lot. To avoid swearing so much, I could’ve taken off my sweatshirt—but it was too cool to to that. I was in a quandary. So, I just kept going, mainly because I’d deliberately put off my shower until after I was done mowing, something I didn’t do yesterday, and I kind of regretted it.

This short video has a couple seconds
of me mowing the last part of the grass out front.

The lawns are all now mowed, and I get to do it all over again in a couple weeks. Yippee. I’m joking, mostly: I don’t actually mind mowing the lawns—especially after I’ve finished—but there are times I fantasise about hiring someone to do it for me. Today, though, I thought about hiring the same people who do my next door neighbours’ house to do just the front yard. That’s the only yard anyone actually sees, and that way the part of our boundary where we have nothing but grass would look better. I’ll probably continue to do the whole thing myself, though.

One thing I wasn’t able to do is use the line trimmer around the edges of the section. That’s because it ran out of filament months ago, and while I bought replacement filament, I couldn’t quite get how to load it. So, I put the changing of it aside, then the weather turned, and it became less important. But now the grass is growing again, and I need it, but there’s a problem: That replacement filament I bought but couldn’t figure out how to use? Well, months ago I put it “somewhere safe”, and now I have no idea where that was. This is a continuing problem, actually. I think I need to start writing down all the “somewhere safe” places I put things.

At least the mowing is done now. Soon it’ll be warmer and I’ll be able to get more work done outside cleaning up the gardens, and by the time we drop Alert Levels, it ay be time to plant some plants out there. This year, I’m determined to start making my yard pretty. I think I just might accomplish it, too.

The video in this post was captured by one of my security cameras. It had been triggered by my movement. Those are garden gloves in my back pocket; the grass was gluggy, so I had to scrape out clumps of grass from underneath when I was about half done (for both the front and back lawns, actually).