I had a bunch of chores that I wanted to get done this weekend. Our gardener has disappeared off the face of the earth, and our front yard was looking ragged and weedy, so I decided to try to mow it myself. I have two mowers in my garage, a Black and Decker rechargeable electric that is approaching 20 years old, and a Toro gas mower that I hadn’t run in a couple of years. I hoped that a quick recharge of the electric mower would make it work, because I didn’t relish pull starting the other mower, but alas, it was not to be. A full night’s recharge didn’t seem to bring it back to life. Sometime when I’m motivated, I’ll have to pull the battery and give it a test. So, it was the Toro. Sadly, my arm is not in the greatest shape since my back injury, and since the mower hadn’t been started in quite some time, I thought it would be difficult.

It was.

I had to yank on the pull starter for a good five minutes before it caught once, and ejected a huge cloud of blue smoke, and promptly died again. Normally after starting to run a little bit, it would be easier to pull start, but that proved not to be the case. I had to flail away on that thing for another five minutes before it caught, ran rough and died. Another five minutes and it caught again, and died. But this time I managed to get it started. I let it idle for about five minutes, then quickly mowed my yard with the cutting height set fairly high. I then let the engine die, lowered the height and then pull started. It started, but also the cord snapped and I was left with the handle and cord in my hand.

Sigh. I finished my yard, but I’ll need to fix that before I can do it again.

I also pruned a hedge and took down Christmas lights.

On Sunday, I had a different chore. My cats had discovered how much fun it was to play in the limbs of our artificial Christmas tree, and they seemed genuinely sad when we took it down. I decided that they needed another cat tree to replace it, so last Wednesday I ordered this new cat tree from chewy.com. I started to assemble it this morning. Any misgivings I had about whether they would like it were immediately dispelled. Pepper was using the first scratching post before I even got to the next level, had explored the little cubby hole even before I got the screws in, and both were on top of every layer as I worked.

They seemed to like it.

I didn’t get to my 3D printer repairs.