If only I’d started sooner! One of my old schoolmasters used to offer wise advice whenever he saw someone wasting time and putting off what they should be doing. ‘Procrastination is the thief of time!’ he’d say, occasionally bonking you over the head at the same time with the book that you should have been using to do your work. He’d never have got away with it nowadays, he’d have been up for assault with huge damages awarded against him, but he was absolutely right, of course. And today was a classic case in point. I’ve mentioned several times recently that I wanted to get my grass cut for the last time this year but it’s been too wet even when it hasn’t been raining to think about getting the mower out. But today was different. The forecast hadn’t been that bright but even when I got up and felt the grass outside the back door of my ‘sejour’, it was dryer than it had been for many-a-day recently and was only likely to get better. But as usual on a Saturday morning, I fiddled around, read emails, made a couple of phone calls, caught up with the forums and drank more tea. And then it was time for lunch.<\/p>\n
Afterwards I had the idea of cutting my grass in the back of my mind but thought it would be a better idea at that moment to take my rubbish and recycling up to the ‘poubelles’ just up the road. We don’t have household rubbish collections down here. Instead here and there where there are houses we have rubbish collection stations in the form of large commercial size plastic bins at the side of the road. After collecting our waste at home, where if we’re responsible we keep rubbish, recyclables and glass separate, whenever we choose, we just pop them in the back of the car (my estate is perfect, of course), drive to the bins and drop them in. It’s a good idea because the local council only have to visit each waste station rather than every house, thus keeping the cost of rubbish collection down. But I digress – see, it’s so easy to, isn’t it! When I drove down to the bins my car temperature gauge indicated a reading of 17.5 deg C and even I could see that I just couldn’t let such a glorious day go to waste. But by that time it was well past 2.00pm and sunset down here was at 5.18pm today, so I needed to get my skates on \ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n
I got cracking with a vengeance and as I got the grass down at the back where the X-Air has been patiently waiting for me to do the work on it that I need to do and for which I have had the parts for several weeks, I could have kicked myself for leaving it to so late in the day. Pretty soon I was down to a tee shirt and after a short delay while I had to un-stick the choke cable when I had to restart the mower engine, eventually I was standing back admiring the back grass (I can’t call it a lawn, it’s just too tatty…) which was down to the lowest it had ever been. Then it was the turn of the front. The lime tree has by now shed all of its leaves and apart from filling my front gutter, there are what looks like tons of the damn things on the ground beneath it. I’d already picked up all of the old wood that I could find nestling in the grass since although the mower seems to deal with it without causing itself any harm, the crashes and bangs it makes in the process make you wince a bit, so I got going without any break as I thought that if I stopped, I might not start again. <\/p>\n
I ploughed up and down the lawn for what seemed like ages with grass and mulched leaves flying in a trail behind me, but I could sense that the afternoon was drawing to a close. Quite frankly, I felt knackered by this time, but I still kept ploughing on out of breath and with back, arms and legs beginning to feel the strain. At one time I thought I might stop for a rest and a cool drink but still I refused to give in as I knew I’d never be able to start again afterwards. Then I thought that the fuel had to run out some time soon, so I’d call it a day when it did. But it didn’t, so still I carried on. By this time I was beginning to really feel it. Not that long ago I had a really thorough medical including lots of heart tests including some pretty gruelling treadmill work so I was pretty sure that although I was pushing myself, I was unlikely to come to any harm on that score. Seriously, you have to think about these things when you reach a certain age, and up and down I went.<\/p>\n
Well, you’ve probably guessed how it all ended. With the light fading and just the last bit of lawn left, the mower engine sputtered to a halt. There was no way that I’d have had enough time to fill up, restart the engine and finish off, so that’s how things have ended up. I would imagine that the lovely warm day that we enjoyed today was the result of a warm front passing through, and we all know what follows a warm front, don’t we. Rain. If I’m lucky and the front is weak and slow-moving, I might have just enough time to finish the front lawn off tomorrow. But I doubt it, because the local forecast is for light rain to start in the early hours tonight and to continue on and off all day tomorrow. So my old schoolmaster has been proven right yet again. The wisdom of ages – if only I hadn’t procrastinated I’d have got the job done and dusted when the time was right, and I don’t think that keeping my fingers crossed is going to help me finish it off now \ud83d\ude41 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If only I’d started sooner! One of my old schoolmasters used to offer wise advice whenever he saw someone wasting time and putting off what they should be doing. ‘Procrastination is the thief of time!’ he’d say, occasionally bonking you over the head at the same time with the book that you should have been … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3919"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3925,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919\/revisions\/3925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}