Recycle, Reduce, and Reuse.

 I am sure you are aware that in this modern day and age we are supposed to recycle, reduce, and reuse anything we possibly can.  Throw your aluminum monster cans in the recycle bin, wipe your but with only one square of toilet paper, and of course reuse plastic sporks and stuff.  Well last week I had a traumatic event happen to me, OK so you might not think it is traumatic but my lawn mower of something like eight years or more finally bit the dust.  From the picture above you are saying it looks just fine but it is not, trust me on this I am not an expert.

 What happened is the spark plug wire somehow broke into two pieces.  You can see in the picture above the black plastic wire and the metal hanging out and in the background is the spark plug where the other half of this wire should be attached to.  This on a car is a simple fix, you just go to any random auto parts store and buy a new plug wire.  On a lawn mower the wire is connected to the coil, and nobody keeps this part in stock especially a random Home Depot disposable residential mower.  The part has to be ordered, received in like two weeks and installed.  The part costs 60 bucks, installation costs 40 dollars, then it would be good to go in like the middle of the summer.

 With the repair to the old mower at such a high cost I was at a cross road, do I repair the mower, do I buy a new mower, or do I find a used mower on craigslist.  Well I went with option "C" which was to surf the inter-web on the list of Craig for a self propelled mower (yes I am old, lazy and enjoy my mower going on its own power) .  The price that kept coming up was 150.00 dollars and if you have ever bought anything on the list of Craig you know that whatever price they list is what we call the starting point, so I sent out several emails with a solid low offer to see if anybody would bite.  I received lots of emails that only had one word in them: "no" not even a counter offer or anything except one guy was willing to accept my offer and that is how I wound up with the mower you see in the picture above.

 I paid 80 bucks for this 6.25 horsey powered "quantum" self propelled mower.  Now my mower which is like ten levels below this mower at Home Depot costs 329.00 for a similar model and it has like half the horsey power as this one.  This mower is like in the 500 dollar range and up, it is darn close to commercial edition which is like the holy grail of mowers (OK I am a lawn dork) but they run close to a grand.

 Once I got the mower home I got it out of the bed of the truck and started to mow.  Now things were looking great with this new mower and life was so good I found the snake you see above in my backyard as I mowed.  I am pretty sure it is a rat snake, we have had field mice real bad this year.  I caught him and put him in the cull De sac and as I did my neighbors daughters boyfriend was pulling up in their driveway which gave me an opportunity to use one of my classic jokes.  He got out of his truck and I asked him to come over and help me identify this snake I caught.  As he got closer I then turned to him and pretended to be un-buttoning my pants, and he stops and goes "wow dude I am not looking at that kind of snake" and I laughed and stopped and told him it was on the ground and we laughed about it and he agreed that it was a form of snake (alot of help that kid was).  Then my neighbors younger daughter played with the snake in the street for a couple of hours afterwards and he is probably now hunting me down and going to eat me or something.

Then as I was mowing my forest I came across a random crooked neck squash plant growing in my yard.  Whenever I plant things in the garden I like to toss the rest of the seeds in the yard to see if any take and sure enough looks like yard squash will be on the menu in 30 days or so.

So the moral to this story is sometimes buying used is better if not worse, wait not worse scratch the last part but better because once somebody has bought something that has a long shelf life like small engine items and tools they resale at a fraction of their original price.  So if you are savvy, which if you have diabetes you have to be savvy, finding these items on the inter-web can save you money like getting extra free samples from your endo.