The Facebook “Memories” served up to me this week have been find of funny/odd. Three different times it served up “Memories” of things I’d posted in the past, and then repeated this week. Most of the time, I get “Memories” that aren’t worth sharing, but it’s not often I get so many revisited things so close to each other
This past Tuesday, the “Memory” was about the time I took my mother-in-law to a Japanese restaurant near our house on Auckland’s North Shore, and that same day six years later I went out for lunch with her, my brother-in-law and one of my sisters-in-law, and we went to a (really nice) Japanese restaurant here in Hamilton.
A couple days later it was a post from four years ago, where I shared a Cher meme about changing our clocks (New Zealand went back to NZ Standard Time at 3am last night, or this morning, depending on how you view such things).
Today, it turned out to be that I mowed the lawns this same date last year (which was a Saturday, of course, and we also changed our clocks at 3am that night (or the following morning, depending on how you view such things). As it happens, I was planning on mowing my lawns today, too—is this now an annual thing? Maybe it could be part of an all-new Season of Anniversaries?
That’s where the coincidences ended, and today’s adventure was a bit more challenging that last year’s was. In fact, it was much more difficult.
I was mowing the lawns today because it was a few days overdue. I couldn’t be bothered mowing last week, when I should’ve (I did other things), and it was becoming fairly urgent: The weed paspalum was sending up spikes for its seedheads, and it made the lawns look particularly untidy.
The problem with paspalum is that the stalks for the seedheads are generally low to the ground, and also springy, so the mower doesn’t always chop it off at the ground. So, I often have to go over the same plant two, three, even four times to finally get the stalks chopped off.
So, mowing the weed patch—sorry, “lawns”—took a *LOT* of effort. That fancy new battery I bought for the mower at the end last year ran out of power with about 20-ish minutes of mowing to go, the first time that’s ever happened with that fancy new battery. It was interesting to me because it ran out of juice at roughly the same area where the older battery used to die, and that happened often as the lawns thickened over time, which is why I bought the fancy new battery. I hope this isn’t the way of the future, but if it is, I have the old battery to ensure I can finish the lawns once I start.
When I was done, and put the fancy new battery on to charge, I drank a lost of water and grabbed an old towel to wipe up my sweat. Then, I stood in front of the air conditioner for a bit, and went to sit down in my chair to rest a bit—all of which is my usual post-mowing routine in summer. I gradually cooled down, and decided to go have a shower, so I started to stand up—and things didn’t go well.
Neither of my legs seemed like they’d be able to support me: The calves of both felt like they were cramping, and a couple times I thought they might give way. I hobbled out into the kitchen, and drank some more water, and then I grabbed an open bag of potato chips from the pantry. At the time, I was craving potato choips, and it occurred to me that maybe I’d sweat a lot more than I’d realised, and I was low in salt.
When I was a kid, on very hot days my mother would make me drink a small glass of water with some salt in it. She said it would help prevent heat stroke (though I had no idea what that was back then—I was probably like five or six at the time). She also said it would prevent muscles cramping from me overheating.
So, with that childhood memory, combined the fact that I almost always give in to food cravings (because they’re quite rare for me, and I figure that when I get one my body is trying to tell me it needs something in that food), I sat down with a more water and that bag of chips. A little while later, I did, in fact, feel better, though my legs were still stiff, pretty much until I was done with my shower.
Nothing like that has happened to me in the two years I’ve been mowing my lawns, though my lower back has started to hurt more frequently by the time I get to the end of the job. I think that’s mostly because I need to lose weight: I’m carrying too much belly fat. But that weird, weak-legged, nearly crampy feeling? Never had anything like that happen before.
So, I think the next mowing related thing I need to do is find a water bottle holder I can clip onto my lawn mower’s handle. That’d be a very good idea, especially for the summer. And, I need to lose weight to help my back. Adulting is bloody hard work!
And that’s been my coincidental week of “Memories” that turned out to be different, though similar, this week. The mowing one was the most different of all.
I hope next week’s “Memories” are much tamer.
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