Fun With Lawn Mowers

I'm not trying to brag but Jason and I truly are an endless source of entertainment at times, and we manage to do this without even trying. I swear we need our own reality TV show with cameras following us around. I think the response of the average viewer would be something along the lines of "are these people really that stupid? Is this really their life?" as they watched us deal with rocks and attempt to mow the grass.

On Saturday Jason was mowing our yard (third mowing of the year). Jason likes mowing the yard even though he tries to pretend that he doesn't. Now he does hate edging and weed whacking but he seems to go into a zen-like state on the lawn mower. I was scrubbing a water trough in one of the pastures when I noticed the lawn mower wasn't moving anymore. I didn't really pay too much attention and went back to my scrubbing.

Then I noticed the truck backing up to the lawn mower. This got my full attention. I was done scrubbing the trough and put the hose in to start filling it with water and paid closer attention to what Jason was doing. He put the truck in position near the mower, then he got out and started attaching a tow rope to the lawn mower and the truck. Then I saw him lugging a large piece of scrap lumber to the lawn mower. I asked about this later and he said he was using the lumber to make sure the mower stayed in neutral. Then he proceeds to tow the lawn mower up onto the driveway with the truck. He unhooks everything and goes back to mowing.

Apparently Jason was trying to avoid getting the push mower out and was attempting to use the riding mower in an area normally reserved for the push mower. Clearly this did not work out very well. It was a real shame that I did not have my camera with me to get pictures of Jason towing the lawn mower.

Watching that made me remember another incident we had that involved towing a lawn mower. When Jason and I were first married we lived in Vermont for a year. When I announced I was never doing another New England winter Jason readily agreed to move back to Tennessee. One of the things we did not move from Vermont to Tennessee was our riding lawn mower. It had died and obviously we didn't want to have to ship it back to Tennessee. Our neighbor decided he wanted it as he thought he could repair it.

Just like yesterday Jason hooked up a tow rope from the riding lawn mower to the truck. He told me to drive the truck and tow him the half mile down the road to our neighbor's house on the riding mower. We make it out of the driveway and I'm towing Jason along on the dead riding lawn mower, driving very slowly. Jason screams at me to go faster, that I'm going too slow and this is taking too long. I step on the gas. We all pick up speed. Except now we're on a downhill slope.

Of course I slow down but this does not slow Jason and the riding lawn mower down. He manages to steer the dead mower around the truck to avoid hitting it. He goes whizzing past me on the dead mower at about 20mph. As Jason passed me on the lawnmower our eyes met for a fraction of a second that felt like forever.  Jason was looking at me with a "HELP ME" expression.  I was looking at him with "what the heck do you expect me to do??" expression.

At that moment the tow rope snaps. Jason is now flying down the hill on the road on the dead mower attempting to steer it. He's screaming "oh bleeeeeeeep" as the mower whips down the hill. I had stopped the truck and blocked the road with it to deter any traffic that might come along. I remember watching Jason on the runaway mower, listening to him yell, and I will admit I was laughing so hard I had tears running down my face. I'm laughing now just remembering the scene. You have to admit this is funny, and I'm telling you it was much funnier in person.

At last Jason hits another uphill slope. The mower slows and finally stops. We re-hook up the tow rope and Jason screams at me not to drive so fast this time. I decided not to point out that he was the one who told me to go faster. It was obvious even to me it was the wrong time to make that observation. Jason and the mower were safely towed into the neighbor's driveway.

We would have won America's Funniest Home Videos if we had managed to get that little incident captured on video. Yes, this really is our life.

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Jason mowing the lawn on Saturday. Who knew riding lawn mowers could generate so many stories?

Jason doing fence repairs, one of his least favorite jobs. I had to take this picture from another pasture and zoom in. Jason said I had taken too many "unhappy Jason" pictures lately. Such a pretty scene to me. Fuzzy, Clay, Wiz, Dutch, Murphy, Chili

Sebastian and Wiz

Darby, Alex and Boo

Dutch, Boo and Wiz

Asterik, Chimano, Romeo, Gus, Winston, Faune

Toledo, Clayton and Kennedy

Bush wearing his Thunder Shirt; if there is even a rumble of thunder he loses his mind.

Trooper

Chili, Boo, Fuzzy, B-Rad, Justin

B00 and Justin

Gus; such a pretty face

Faune and Chimano

Clayton, Tiny and Johnny

Slinky, Snappy, Lucky and Lightening

Spike and Noble

Murphy and Alex

Rock: 2, Jason & Melissa: 0

The saga of the rock continues. For anyone keeping a running tally the score goes something like this:

Rock: 2 Jason and Melissa and any plan they come up with: 0

You have no idea, none, how sick I am of this stupid rock. For those of you wondering what on earth I am talking about you should read the first post on our encounter with this rock. As you know this rock already defeated the 4 ton Ditch Witch. We called in the big guns. The guy with the backhoe (I should add here a very LARGE backhoe) came yesterday. He started pounding away at this rock with his large backhoe. I'll sum it up with the following score:

Rock: 1 Backhoe: 0

Someone in the comments section said she and her husband graded rocks using the system of "softball, basketball, volkswagen." I would like to add MACK TRUCK to that grading system. After never finding so much as a pebble at the new farm we find ourselves to be the proud owners of the Mack Truck of rocks. Reminder: a couple THOUSAND fence posts, 1 barn, and 3 run-in sheds later not so much as a piece of gravel. And now Jason has met his nemesis.

You have to understand, Jason hates rocks. He hates rocks of all sizes, from the softball to the Mack Truck they are all evil in Jason's world. We spent years searching for a farm because after the last few years of dealing with the family farm and its abundance of rocky soil Jason made a Scarlett O'Hara vow. Except instead of saying "as God as my witness I will never go hungry again" Jason modified this to "as God as my witness I will never pick up another rock again."

Needless to say the Mack Truck of rocks has wiped the smug smile off of Jason's face - the one he used to have anytime he bragged about his beautiful topsoil. The irony of it all is that this rock is located in top soil. Even the backhoe guy couldn't believe it. He kept saying "we're still in topsoil, this shouldn't be here." Uh, look dude, we've already discussed extensively that this rock shouldn't be here, you're here not to tell us the obvious but to get the #$%^&! thing out.

He starts pounding away at this thing with the bucket. Literally pounding at it. After a loooong time (and of course we have to pay for this by the hour) and much pounding he's managed to break off four large sections of this rock and we're nowhere near the bottom of Mt. Rock. After getting these four pieces of it busted out all progress stopped. It didn't matter what he did, how much power he put into it, how many times the big bucket slammed into this thing it wasn't budging or breaking. And it was too big to attempt to lift out of the ground even with the big backhoe.

The only chunks that were removed from the offending Mt. Rock. This picture simply does not convey the size of these pieces of Mt. Rock. We can't even move them with the 60hp tractor. Jason said if we brought the 100hp tractor down we might be able to push them with the bucket. So here they sit, blocking the area where they were supposed to start putting gravel to extend the driveay. You just have to love this rock.

Finally the backhoe guy waves the white flag at the rock and surrenders. We had already tried to go around the rock with the ditch witch this weekend in the area to the right in the picture above. They ended up having to trench a little detour to the left in the horse pasture. No rock there. It took a few minutes to dig the detour trench, the water pipe was put in, the trench was covered back up, and the water line was ready to go.

Then backhoe guy had to leave as he had another job to get to. He had anticipated only being at our farm for a short while. Just get the rock out, easy as pie, done. Hahahahahahaha. A few hours later he has to go and we're stuck with pieces of this boulder blocking the area where the gravel guys were supposed to start extending our driveway. I guess that has been delayed until backhoe guy can come back and drag/push our boulders off to the woods or something.

There is a lot I would like to say here but I won't. I could mention that we really didn't have to go to all of this trouble since we had already gotten down far enough with the Ditch Witch to bury our water line before we hit the rock but I won't. I could mention that we could have just tried to trench around it on both sides, not just one, with the Ditch Witch but I won't mention that either. I could mention that not only have we paid for the ditch witch and several hours with the backhoe, but now we're going to have to pay someone to bring in a load of soil to fill in the crater left by the removal of the boulder-sized pieces of this rock, all over someone's fixation with water lines being 2 feet in the ground. But I won't mention that either.

In other news related to this freaking water line it is finally in and ready to go. Of course given how other things associated with this line have gone this didn't go just as smoothly as it could have either. Jason was working away in the ditch getting filthy and gross while doing all of the plumbing to tap the new water line into the old one. Then there was a small problem.

This is not the face of a happy Jason; we've seen this face a lot lately

If the boulder wiped the smile off of Jason's face this made it disappear completely for awhile. It has been a trying week. I am happy to say that all is working properly now. I don't even know what this was all about. I think it was just Jason taking his frustration out on something. I would hear sawing and then "bleep!" Then "Melissa find the hammer - now!!" So then we had sawing, "bleep," hammering, "bleep, bleep!" Like people rubber necking to look at a wreck on the interstate the horses start to gather at both gates to watch the crazy people. They could have cared less about the backhoe and rock pounding, but gosh they love to watch us when we get worked up over something. Apollo says "Look Ivan, they're starting to wave their hands around and yell again." As you can see this section of pipe was sawed and hammered into pieces. I don't know why or what the purpose was. I just stopped asking questions at that point and watched along with the horses.

We now have another 1200 feet of water line. It works properly. We have some lovely new landscaping pieces to work with. My mom suggested maybe a landscaping company would want our boulder chunks as apparently sometimes these are used in landscaping design. I said "Mom, the problem is they wouldn't own a piece of equipment large enough to move them. I think we are stuck with these things for life." Hopefully backhoe guy will return tomorrow to move our new landscaping features out of our driveway.

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Rocky and Clayton Chili taking a nap Rampal and Johnny Mina watching Jo and Jason . . .

. . . playing on the teeter totter

Traveller

Lexi and Bonnie

Levendi, Ivan and Tony

Ivan and Tony

Thomas and Hemi

Elfin

Missy and Silky

Chili, Fuzzy, Clay, Sebastian, Murphy

Finding the Rock

We're getting ready for another moving day in the very near future. As you have seen from previous posts we've built more fence and another run-in shed. The only thing left to do is to run water and electricity down to the new pasture. That was our project over the weekend. We feel like we're pretty much old hands at all of this construction stuff at this point.

Jason on the Ditch Witch

On Saturday morning Jason headed over to the rental place and rented the trenching machine, otherwise known as the Ditch Witch. We are fans of the Ditch Witch and are more familiar than we would like to be with this piece of equipment. In all of our construction at the new farm there have been a couple thousand fence posts put in the ground so far. We've already put in over 1200 feet of water lines. Earthwork was done for the barn and the three run-ins, plus these buildings involved setting multiple large posts. In all of this construction we've never hit one single rock. Not one. I'm sure you are guessing where this is headed . . .

We unloaded the Ditch Witch off the trailer and Jason started trenching. My job was to use the tape measure and make sure the trench was always at least 18" deep, ideally we aim for 22"-24". Although our frost line here is only six inches (and the main water line we tapped into at the road was buried at a depth of six inches) Jason likes to lay our water lines about two feet deep. This is another area where his Canadian roots come out. I guess when you grow up in a place where your water lines had better be at least 8 feet in the ground six inches probably seems like a highly unacceptable depth. So we aim for two feet.

The horses used to find all of our construction projects highly entertaining. Last summer the Big Boys would gather at the fence and watch Jason for hours as he built out the interior of the barn. They were especially fascinated with the nail gun. I guess at this point all of the horses feel like they've seen it all and no longer find any of our projects particularly interesting or entertaining.

Regis was having a lazy day and saying "do these people ever quit working? Don't they know this is a retirement farm? Man, they're really stupid." Spike was thinking "Another day, another construction project. Ho hum. Those two are just gluttons for punishment."

Jason is trenching away and I'm dutifully measuring the trench every couple of feet. All was going well. Until suddenly it wasn't going well. The Ditch Watch starts lurching around and smoke is coming from the trench. Then it stalls out and dies. For the first time in our many construction projects we had hit a rock. Jason was not happy. I tell him to just start the trencher again and keep chipping away, that it is probably just a little rock and we happen to hit it just right.

So we start this cycle of lurching trencher, smoke coming from the trencher while grinding against the rock, trencher stalling out. After the 4th try Jason and I have a meeting of the minds while staring into the trench. This rock is looking kind of - uh oh - big.

Jason: We're going to have to get an excavator in here, this is never going to bust through that.

Me: Never say die! Keep trying, we'll eventually get through it.

Jason: Not gonna happen.

Me: Then get me a pick axe and I'll bust through this thing. (I should add here that I am a somewhat OCD type person. If I have something on my to-do list that day by gosh it is going to get done. It can make me a hard person to live with at times.)

Jason: Silence, he looks at me like I've lost it.

Me: Stop staring at me and let's do something! Surely YOU can get through this thing with a pick axe and a shovel.

Jason: Look at how big this rock is. We're not going to get through it.

Me: Try moving the ditch witch over and see if we can just go around the rock.

Jason: Gives me a doubtful look but complies with my request. He hits rock in the same area. He turns off the ditch witch and announces "we're done."

Me: I'm still in never say die mode. I'm peppering Jason with "What about this" and "why don't we try." I'm getting worked up. Picture my arms flailing about as I gesticulate wildly trying to convince Jason we can do this. Can't we use the tractor or something?? Come on Jason, put your big boy pants on and start swinging a shovel or something!!!

Jason: Now he's starting to flail his arms around while gesticulating, making his point that the rock is too big, the Ditch Witch clearly cannot get through it, and if the 4 ton trencher can't bust through the rock we aren't going to to do it.

This is not the face of a happy Jason

While we had this raised voice, arms flailing conversation it was the only time the horses paid any attention to us. I think the peanut gallery would have been egging us on and heckling if they could talk. The horses find serious entertainment value in watching a husband and wife attempt to work together on a daily basis. In the end Jason convinced me that since the Ditch Witch could not get through this rock nothing else we had at our disposal was going to the job either. He left a message for a guy that has an excavating machine. The excavator is coming tomorrow to solve our rock problem.

We needed to put in about 1200 feet of water line. There was a patch of rock in about 10 feet of that. We are having to bring in an excavator for 10 feet. There really is no justice in this world sometimes. The kicker to this is that even if we laid the water line on top of the rock it would have been more than six inches under ground. But NOOOOOO, we have to exceed that by another foot and a half. I'm just saying . . .

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Regis, Noble, Slinky and Snappy Gus Thomas, Elfin and Trigger

Chance, Trigger and Levendi

Hemi and Thomas

Tony

Elfin and Apollo

Clayton and Toledo

B-Rad and Murphy

Lily, MyLight and Silky

Jason petting Mina . . .

. . . and Jo

Romeo, Winston and Faune

Rampal and Clayton anxiously waiting for me to feed them

Sebastian

Sea Storm

Sea Storm, more affectionately known as Stormy, is by the imported Hanoverian Stallion “Sandsturm” and out of a TB mare “Viento de Marza”. Stormy’s prior owner lived on Martha’s Vineyard, so the combination of the owner’s island location and his sire and dam’s names resulted in the name “Sea Storm.”

Sea Storm

Stormy’s mom was a typical horse crazy kid. She had a horse growing up but never any formal training. As often happens horses went on the back burner while she was in college and then law school. Once she had gotten herself through law school Stormy’s mom was determined to get back into horses and riding. It was at this point that she discovered dressage and started riding with her trainer who she ride with to this day, many, many years later. After leasing for a while she was ready to buy her own horse, and the search began.

Stormy's mom is lucky enough to have a foal picture of him. Does it get any cuter than a new foal snuggled up to a cat?

During the horse search she originally fell in love with a mare in Rhode Island named Compass Rose. However the mare’s owner had a change of heart about selling her and took her off the market. It was back to the drawing board. At this point someone found an advertisement for Stormy, so Stormy’s mom and her trainer jumped on a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard to check him out. In addition to meeting Stormy that day his mom actually had the opportunity to run the ferry. Many memories came out of that fateful day.

Stormy had just turned 6 and both he and his mom were very green when it came to the discipline of dressage. They were a challenging combination to say the least. Stormy was not gelded until he was 3 years old and is very spirited and smart. According to his mom submission was never one of his strong points. As she said it is not one of hers either so they were at least able to understand each other! Stormy’s mom jokingly told us about one of her "fond" memories of their first clinic together. During their ride Stormy actually stopped, backed and fired double barrels at the clinician. It sounds to me like Stormy wanted to make a statement . . . and he did! As the years passed they began to come into their own together, but it was always Stormy’s way or the highway.

Stormy and his mom riding in a clinic (not the one where he attempted to double barrel the clinician!)

Stormy and his mom competed up to 2nd level at local shows and around the New England area. They had great times traveling with fantastic friends and had lots of laughs over the years. She said at times she and Stormy were the laughing stock and at times he was brilliant. At their last show together Stormy pulled out all the stops and they scored a personal best score of 74.211%.

Stormy and his mom competing at a show

She knew when Stormy had had enough, that he no longer enjoyed his work, and it was time for retirement. The cold was tough on him and she felt it would be easier on him to retire further south. Retiring Stormy was very difficult for her, but then again I’ve yet to meet the person who found it easy. As with most people who are retiring a partner and a friend it was very emotional time for her. It is very important to add here that she considers herself lucky that certain friends still talk to her (and she adds you know who you are).

His mom is hoping to lease a horse this summer and is continuing her riding career as a catch rider. I admire her attitude. It can be easy to stay in that place of feeling sorry for yourself and stomping your foot while saying “nothing is better than the partnership you have with your own horse.” (I know this because I might have had this attitude myself several years ago when I retired my beloved mare Bridget.)

Stormy and his mom training at home

I did not know this but Stormy’s mom searched for his perfect retirement home for two years. Apparently we were one of the first farms she heard about and the one she ultimately chose after she visited the farm. Jason and I remember her visit well. She and her aunt made a trip to the Nashville area and worked a farm visit in while they were here. We all had a good time laughing and joking. It such an honor, and also such a responsibility, to have people like Stormy’s mom place so much trust in us.

Stormy is having a grand time roaming big open fields, rolling and playing with new friends and generally enjoying life. Stormy still has his my way or the highway approach to life – there are some things in life that never change.

Stormy and his friend Tiny passing a very relaxing afternoon; this picture is another one that makes my favorites list