Yard work equipment and a grill

I have a love/hate relationship with gas-powered lawn equipment. The townhome had a nice, small, manageable-sized, fence-in yard in the back with a small wooden deck and shed. When we first moved in, I borrowed the neighbor’s weed whacker to tame it. Depending on your point of view, that did or did not work out well.

I had never had a yard before so I was new to this. I just weed whacked the greenery until it was all gone. The upside is that, in getting rid of it completely, I wouldn’t have to deal with it for a longer period of time. The downside is that it was literally dirt ugly.

At Laura’s insistence, I bought a mower and got my own weed whacker - all second-hand of course. The old adage that you get what you pay for is generally true. That has been a long, slow education for me. Because of my financial history, I have typically gone for the cheapest which usually breaks the quickest. Yet, despite this oft-learned lesson, this old habit has died a long, slow death with me. Sometimes I grudgingly go with the next to cheapest.

With mowers, I have usually found bad juju whether they have been new or used. The best one I ever had falls into another old adage - the best things in life are free. One day I saw a couple of mowers sitting by the road, waiting for the trash pick-up. I stopped to inspect them and found that one of them just had rusty contact points. I took it home, sanded off the rust and had that mower for years with no problems whatsoever.

Weed whackers are another story altogether. Those who are mechanically-minded probably have more success because they know how to fix such things. I attempt to figure them out, sometimes with success, often not so much. Since our townhome yard was fairly small, I started with the corded electric weed whacker. But since the cord can be a hassle, I moved up to gas-powered. 

After numerous oil leakings and almost yanking my shoulder out of socket trying to get them to start, I finally settled on battery-powered. They do have some downsides as well but less than the other options in my opinion. If I had my way, I’d live in a condo without a yard so I don’t have to deal with all this. My family has a different opinion.

Grilling is a big part of the American middle-class lifestyle. I didn’t feel that I had quite attained middle-class, as of yet, although I was moving in that direction. We were now in a townhome but we were renting and we still didn’t have much extra money. It wasn’t that I was grasping to become middle class. Rather, I was kind of amazed that, after my somewhat gypsy upbringing, I now found myself in this whole new world. I was grateful but still a bit tentative about it all. Yet, for some reason, I felt that if I got a grill, I would reach some sort of significant milestone in this American middle class journey.

Although charcoal grills are quite cheap, I didn’t want to deal with all that lighting and waiting and lack of control. My dream was a more expensive gas grill. Someone at CBN had put up a notice on one of the bulletin boards that they were selling some stuff. Unfortunately it was a divorce situation but it included a GAS GRILL!

The location was a bit of a hike but I went to take a look. It was one of the smallest, cheapest grills but that suited me just fine. So for $25, I obtained that little piece of American middle-classism which lasted me for many years.

At the back of our townhome