The absolute highlight was Sunday, when a bunch of us got together for lunch to celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday. I was asked to bring some bread rolls, and I decided to go in Sunday morning so they’d be freshest, and I also decided to go to New World, the supermarket that’s slightly farther away from my house than Countdown is. I knew they had a good selection of different rolls, and that they were nice.
Since I was driving there from home for the first time since the new road opened, I decided to time it: It look me under seven minutes to get there (and home), and this was in daylight hitting at least two traffic lights in each direction. This was half to a third of the time it used to take me to drive there before the road was opened.
We had a really nice time catching up, and lunch was awesome. The birthday girl and I were the last to leave, though only a few seconds behind one of my sisters-in-law. I dropped my mother-in-law off at her place, then headed home.
The most physically active part of my weekend was Saturday. A big job was calling to me.
For about a week or so, I’d been looking a good patch of weather so I could mow my lawns. It seems like it rains several days in every week, and it’s done that for months. That makes it hard to plan mowing because I like to have at least two days in a row without rain, and in winter a couple more, too, is ideal. Last week there were several non-rainy days, even if they weren’t exactly sunny, but at night there was heavy dew because of the cold temperatures. There were a couple days in the week when I absolutely could have mowed the lawns, except that I just wasn’t into it those days. The stars finally aligned on Saturday.
I wasn’t exactly into mowing on Saturday any more than I was any of the days I didn’t do it, but I managed to push through and do it anyway. My success was mainly because of the fact that even though the front lawn wasn’t yet hideous, I was worried that if I didn’t mow the grass that day things could get out of control quickly.
I managed to mow the front lawn and most of the back before the battery died. I was trying to at least finish the part of the back lawn that I can see from inside the house, but I didn’t quite get that far. It turned out that the battery was actually half full, so I think it may have become too warm from the strain of cutting the moist grass (as I’ve mentioned in the past, there’s a failsafe cutoff to prevent the battery overheating, because we all know what happens when lithium batteries get too hot…).
I brought the battery inside and put it on the charger (using solar power, of course). If it had overheated, it cooled off quickly, probably because it was quite cool outside. While the battery charged, I took time to recharge myself, then did some small (and not at all tiring) jobs inside.
Just before I went outside to finish mowing the back lawn, I let Leo outside. He ran to the back fence and barked like crazy. I thought it was because there were people sitting outside (I have no idea who lives there).
Anyway, they pointed out that their cat was out there, too, and I guess that’s what Leo was actually barking at. I looked over the fence at what one of the people was looking at and saw the cat was sitting on the ground at the base of the fence—probably to annoy Leo, as cats do.
I picked Leo up, and he stopped barking, of course. The cat then decided to climb to the top of the fence, and stopped when he saw me holding Leo, who became VERY wriggly and vocal. “Maybe not,” the cat probably thought and jumped back down on its side of the fence.
I put Leo inside, and he raced to the front window to bark at—well, probably nothing, as dogs seem to do. Maybe he was just letting me know how annoyed he was that I put him back in the house.
I then went outside and finished the mowing, which took maybe ten minutes—and it closed the Exercise and Move rings on my watch, earning me the July Challenge Award. I’ve received the monthly award every month this year except for March because for some reason it didn’t give me credit for reaching whatever the goal was for that month. I’m still bitter about that.
There’s a particular way I can tell what a full weekend I had: Both Saturday and Sunday night, I fell asleep in my chair as I was watching TV. It’s not exactly rare for that to happen, but it almost never happens two nights in a row. I guess my busy weekend was busy.
This image with this post is a screen grab of my watch face not long after I finished mowing the lawns. The blue "Stand" ring closed a little while later.
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