My ¤&"%#)¤/# lawn mower

The damn thing has been doing it's very best to make my gardening life as miserable as possible. Last summer I hated my lawn mower with a passion. It's only fair, seeing how it obviously hated me right back. Then, over the winter, I sort of forgot the fact that it's a demonic little hellmachine. The mower, on the other hand, probably spent the winter months plotting and planing on how it could be an even bigger pain in my green thumb next year.

I mentioned yesterday that I'm not much of a housewife. Well, I'm not much of a gardener, either. Peoples neat and organized gardens are the reasons why there are so few hedgehogs left. I can't in good consicence kill sweet, little hedgehogs, now can I?

I do, however try to keep the lawn under control. But this also becomes somewhat difficult, when your trusted mower turns out to be the devil incarnate. Last week, it decided that it didn't want to work. At all. This desicion was underlined by a thick puff of smoke and a very interesting, yet unpleasant smell. I checked the spark plug (it forced me to learn what a sparkplug is!) and changed the oil and so on and so forth. I don't know ¤&#" about engines, but I checked everything that I could think of that might possibly, perhaps be wrong. Yet, the horrible little thing just stands there and does nothing.

Attacking it with the sledgehammer probably wouldn't make the lawnmower feel better, but I'm starting to think it might be fun for me...

What is that smell?

Old people make strange smells. They don’t really seem to come from anywhere in particular, but manage fill the air around you completely. The strange thing is that sometimes I can smell it, even after I’ve gone home and had a shower. It’s like my very own, private version of The Sixth Sense:

I smell old people.

Speaking of smells – There’s another odd smell in my bathroom. Kinda like something died. I’m guessing that there might be algae growing in a pipe somewhere, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from. Shouldn’t there be a rule, or something, that smells (especially the stinky ones) should have to come from somewhere. Ideally, they should have some sort of colour, as well. I’d imagine that the bathroom-smell would be a kinda putrid greenish orange. And it would probably look sort of wet and sticky.

Of course, the bathroom-smell is nothing compared to the bedroom-smell from two years ago. It was winter, and a bunch of mice made their way inside. I guess that’s one of the joys of living in a really old house. Anywho, I took someone’s clever advice to use poison. “They’ll eat the poison,” they said. “They’ll crawl outside to die,” they said. Well, they ate the poison, alright. Then they went to meet their maker inside the walls and underneath the floorboard. The smell defied description.
Long story short: I now live in a very old house, with very new floors and walls.

Okay, I’m spending way to much time thinking with my nose here. Time to find something else to do:)

On mud and such

I hate gardening SO friggin’ much. If they can grow a human ear on the back of a mouse, why can’t somebody invent a type of grass that only grows up to a certain length? And don’t even get me started on weeding… I think I hate weeding most of all. So today I’m ass-up in a flowerbed, pulling at the damn things, when I suddenly feel something crawling up my leg, and look down just in time to see a bunch of the thickest, longest, hairiest damn buglegs I’ve ever seen in my long, sinful life, disappearing up my skirt. Naturally, I freak out. And by that, I mean that I really freak out. If there’s one thing I can’t hack, its creepy crawlies with long legs.
Anywho, I fly straight up in the air and proceed to jumping around the garden, all the while making short, sharp squeaky noises. Pathetic, I know. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there… Earlier that day, I’d been using the garden hose to play with the dog. As a result, a very muddy puddle of water had formed there. I’m now squeak-jumping straight towards it. You can probably see where this is headed, huh?
At just the right moment, I slip and land face first in the mud. The dog, convinced that this is some brilliant, new game that I just made up, jumps right in after me. After about two and a half seconds, I’m completely covered in mud and there may or may not be a crushed monster of a spider somewhere on my person.
Obviously, I head straight for the shower, where I stay until I am absolutely sure that there's not so much as a spider-fiber left on me anywhere. Coming out of the shower, I notice that there's water all over the floor. The cabinet is leaking... It's obviously going to take a lot of time and towels to get the situation under control, and before I'm even close to managing that task, the door flies open. In comes the doggie to see what sort of exciting adventures I'm up to now. It doesn't take much to excite the doggie, really. Since she's been mucking about in the garden all day, she brings with her quite a bit of dirt which, of course, blends very nicely with the water on the floor, creating... well... filth.
Seeing the newly created muck on the floor, her whole expression changes. It goes from a completely mindless yay-I'm-all-worked-up-because-something-fun-might-be-happening, to a look of fascination and slight determination. I can practically see the thought forming in her head. She's not terribly complicated, you see. Before I can stop her, she dives straight into the puddles and starts rolling and wriggling until her white fur turns a nice shade of brownish grey. So now the time had come to bathe the dog. And let me tell you - as dumb as she can be at times, she can spot a bath coming up a mile away. I've only to reach for the dog shampoo, before she bolts and dissapears under the sofa. Ever tried to get a full-grown husky out from underneath the couch? It's no small job. Not when it doesn't want to come out, anyway. But I manage. Outside I go, heading for the garden hose again (since the shower cabinet is still leaking and I don't want to cause another flood), dragging the poor dog on a leash. During the whole bathing-process she looks as if she's being tortured, and as soon as we're done, she starts running around the garden like a lunatic. Probably looking for something else to roll around in. That seems to be what dogs do best, after all.
By the time I'm done with the gardening, the shower and the dog, it's already getting late, and the only thing I have enough energy for, is vegetating in front of my computer.

But hey, at least the blog's updated now:)