Risky Business

As I entered our neighborhood today, something unusual caught my attention.

Something that has made me do a double-take (and almost given me a heart attack) before.

A man was mowing his yard.  Not unusual, you think?  Normally, no, it wouldn't be.  However, there was something different about his lawn mower.  He was using an electric mower.

Again, doesn't seem all that odd at first.  Except when you stop to think of the reason I could tell, from my car, as I was driving down the street, that his mower was electric.

It was plugged in.  With a long orange extension cord.  Which he would lift up and pull out of the way with each sweep of the mower across his yard.

Now, I don't know about you, but that seems pretty risky to me.  How hard would it be for that mower, in a moment of inattention from the homeowner, to cut across the power cord with an awful bzzzzzt! sound?

It makes me wonder...what is he thinking?

No, scratch that.  Because he's a man, and I do not in any way mean this disparagingly, but there is more than one man out there who would only see the usefulness and efficiency of this method, and remain blissfully oblivious to the risks.  No, the real question is -

What is his WIFE thinking?  Because where a man looks at a lawn mower with a power cord and thinks, "What a good idea!  I'll save money - gasoline is so expensive these days - AND save myself trips to the gas station," whereas a woman looks at the lawn mower with a power cord and all she can hear is bzzzt!  bzzzt!  BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT!

But...maybe he's not married.

Or maybe he won't listen to reason.

Or maybe he has some sort of safety system set up.  Maybe...maybe it's safer than it looks to my untrained and unknowing eye?

I'll just close my eyes and hope it's the latter.

Just so's you know...

For those of you who may be wondering (most of you, I suspect) I do plan to update my blog again.  Someday.  Someday soon.  Someday soon, as in, I have taken my computer home (from work) with me every night since last Wednesday, risking getting to work and realizing dang it I left it at home again, so I could post to my blog before bed.  Except, once the kids are in bed...I've been soooooo tired - yes, don't you feel sorry for me? - so tired that I have to spend 3 hours reading a book I've read at least twice before go straight to sleep.  Yes.  Straight.

But, we'll see.  Maybe tonight will be the night.

Maybe.

Woolly Weatherman

One of my favorite memories of fall is playing on my cousins' porch when the woolly worms were out. They always fascinated me. For all intents and purposes, they're bugs, but they're bugs with fur. Pettable bugs. And I remember some years when my cousins' porch was literally littered with them. I'd sit on the porch and watch them crawl around, pick them up, and, of course, pet them. What kid doesn't like to pet things?

Now that I'm all grown up, I've learned that there's more to those little critters than just pretty colors and pettable fur. Did you know that they can predict the weather? The pattern of orange and black stripes on them supposedly gives a hint as to how severe the upcoming winter will be.

Living in The City, I don't see them all that often anymore. Every once in a while I'll catch a glimpse of one on a drive, but it's seldom. However, since April, I've been working in a more rural setting. This given me the benefit of seeing little critters I didn't get to see while I was working downtown: from hawks and buzzards to grasshoppers and wolf spiders. (I didn't say they were all pleasant critters!)

As I left work the other day, I saw the first woolly worm I've seen in several years, little legs rolling it across the pavement. After my initial reaction of, "ooh, neat!" I am sorry to say that my very next thought was, "I wonder what it thinks the weather is going to be like this winter!"

As a little bit of background information, I work for a power company and have become a little bit of a weather geek because it can have a pretty hefty impact on our business. Take, for example, the remnants of hurricane Ike that came through almost a year ago and knocked out power to my whole city for roughly ten days. Take, for a second example, the ridiculously severe ice storm that hit in January and knocked power out for almost the entire central and western part of the state for almost two weeks. Yeah. It wasn't pretty.

So I call up my husband, who is a repository for all sorts of random knowledge about the weather and anything you can find in a Farmer's Almanac, and ask him how the woolly worm forecasts the winter. He responds that the black parts predict bad weather and the orange parts predict mild weather.

Ahhhh. Um. Really?

Then I guess it's a bad thing that this little guy looked like a fuzzy black hole crawling its way across the pavement?

It seems our woolly weather watcher is predicting a wicked winter.

If you live in the Bluegrass, consider yourself warned.