In 24 hours, give or take, my wife and I will have our fifth child. So, without further ado, some ramblings to clear my head and help me concentrate…
Gardening
I'm supposed to be running a half-marathon at the end of June. And I've been resting my left knee for about a month now. Did a superb 8-mile training run, really happy. And then I mowed the lawn. Somewhere around the first turn something went *ping* in my knee and it's been extremely unhappy ever since. So I'm extremely pissed at this. Plan is to rest until we get back from Aberdeen and then see what happens. If I don't get to run, I'm going to be very disappointed.
But my lawnmower hates me anyway. If there's one appliance I'd like Dyson to turn their attention to, it's the mower. When a vacuum cleaner can get rid of the wheels and have functional suction right up to the edges, why can't a mower? Mine is a petrol-driven rotary beastie – our lawn is too big to consider an electric and too small for a ride-on. Besides, with an electric, the power cable would get snagged on the trees. It's got a wheel at each corner – big, inflexible wheels that don't corner easily. Large quantities of the power stick out over the sides of the blade, so you can't mow right up to something or right alongside something. After a mow you still need to get out the strimmer. And it's allergic to grass.
When you get right down to it, it's a motor driving a spinning blade whose sole purpose is the cutting of grass. So why, when it encounters grass more than a couple of inches long, does it die? Is this motor so weak?
And then there's the cuttings collection. I'm sure this seemed like a good idea to the man who designed it, someone with a huge compost bin and an endless capacity for grass cuttings, but when you're emptying the cuttings into a bin liner, the mechanism is superb. Superb at shredding the binliner. Serious design flaw.
Enough whingeing about gardening. I was going to write more but events have overtaken me here at work.
More tomorrow…