another reason to be glad to live on a farm

... as if I needed one!

I am a person who needs times of solitude. It's how I recharge. But sometimes I'm glad we live out here because I'm glad nobody can see me make a fool of myself. Is there a story here? Of course.

Yesterday I set out to mow the lawn. Our tractor has four attachments for the back: the grader blade (smoother of potholes), the snowblower ('nuff said), the brush cutter (big nasty hacker and slicer for rough terrain and shrubs, used for clearing fields and paths through dense growth), and the lawn mower (like a push mower, but much bigger, used on our lawns). These attach to the tractor via a hitch system of one central and two side points.

Aligning these is always fun. This assumes you define "fun" as "annoying shifting of a big tractor back and forth until it lines up the little hole in the hitch to the little post on the attachment and oh, I just missed it again and ah! there it goes, now to line up the other two and oh, moving the tractor now also moves the attachment. lovely"

Once that is done, the powered implements also have a drive shaft that connects the tractor's PTO (power take off) to the slicing blades of doom. This was, I believe, designed by the Institute of Making Things Difficult and Potentially Embarrassing. Straddling the drive shaft, bending way into the tractor and connecting the things without being able to see it is always good for a few laughs.

So yesterday, feeling very purposeful, I unhooked the grader and proceeded to grunt and groan my way through attaching the mower. Just to up my multitasking, I also fed the local blackfly population. The things were swarming everywhere. R was a huge help but I did still have to do some heavy lifting and somehow got a pretty nasty bruise on my palm. But, success! I got things fired up and set out to cut the lawn.

Then I realized I'd hooked up the brush cutter.