"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

It is that time of year to gather up the leaves again as the trees prepare to get naked for winter.  I could never figure that out, shouldn't they keep their protection on to help battle the cold? Nature is strange. Twenty nine years ago some dummy decided to plant maple trees and a beech tree on my lawn. (That dummy would be the originator of this blog.)

You often hear in the business world that production is down, or production is being cut back. These trees are not listening. Production is up, only the leaves are down.

Since manual labour is not one of my true interests, I have a few tools to help me with the leaf gathering process. One of those is the blower/yard vacuum think-a-ma-jig. You know, the kind you sling over your shoulder with bag attached with a powerful gas motor. Maybe not green as far as the environment is concerned, but all the green is gone anyway. This one is powerful enough to suck the laces right out of your sneakers.

So we begin the process and all is going well, the bag fills up rather quickly because these leaves are piled thick. Anyone remember "Nan and the Leaves" from grade primary so many years ago?

So the bag is emptied into the large plastic bag and we go back at it. What's that big cloud of visibility blocking dust behind me? Oh, you have to zip up the vacuum cleaner bag after you empty it so it will retain its contents - neat. Now the idea light comes on! If I changed that thing from vacuum to blower and pointed it up in the air, with a proper wind, my neighbours would be harvesting leaves instead of me. Maybe this thing was a good investment after all.

Suddenly everything comes to a halt. Well the motor is whining at high rpm, but the bag isn't getting filled. Seems last month's newspaper is stuck on the nozzle. It's not mine, I don't subscribe to any newspapers. I don't eat chips in the back yard either, so explain the chip bags. The blower certainly doesn't like the newspaper chip bag diet.

Bag full - empty time again! Ah ha, zipped it back up this time. Not getting me on that one again. Usually that motor starts with the first half pull on the cord. After about ten half pulls my neighbour yells over: "What are you doing, put a nickle in it!" "Not sure," his neighbour yells back with a half dis-located shoulder, "Maybe a little gas would help," as he stares at the empty translucent gas tank.

These fall routines such as gathering leaves is so much fun. Can't wait to get the tractor and sweeper out tomorrow.

-=One Day At A Time=-

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License