As you may or may not recall; or even give a typhus addled rat’s tuckus, a few months back I came into the possession of a painfully dayglo yellow, electric lawn mower which I named O.B. 1 Ryobi.

Clever, I know.

That’s why I did it.

Anyway, we’ve had a pretty dry summer here in south central Texas, so the need for me to push my toy back and forth around Wifey’s gardening aspirations where grass is supposed to be present has been pretty darn limited. 

This is evident in the patches of grass which resemble the crispy crunchiness I request in the steak fries that accompany the occasional chopped beef sandwich I order at any one of three barbeque eateries within a matter of miles of the compound.

At any rate, I took the opportunity to extract O.B. 1 from the garage the other day so that I could mow down the ground cover masquerading as grass.  Ten minutes into the campaign, the mower died on me.

Well crud.

Naturally, I went through the mental rolodex and accessed the handwritten card with every lawn mower troubleshooting entry I had filed away for the last 40 years or so, and put them to work.

Does it have gas?

Is the spark plug wire connected?

Is it primed?

Does it have oil?

The answer to all of those questions was a resounding ‘No’, because O.B. 1 is a battery powered mower that has rendered my checklist useless.

I spent the next few minutes conducting various experiments on that mower that I had done on every mower before, trying to get it to run for longer than a few more minutes.

I won’t go into a whole lot of details, save for the fact that they were pretty stupid rituals which had occasionally worked with previous mowers.

As I coaxed that little yellow bastard to do what it was supposed to do, two people came to mind who once discussed moments like this.  “This is just like what the redneck guy and the Dilbert guy were talking about……..”

Jeff Foxworthy once defined being a redneck as experiencing a glorious absence of sophistication which can be either temporary or permanent.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, discussed a similar phenomenon (ba dee bedebe) in one of his non-fiction books.  Unfortunately, I can’t tell which book it was.  The story appeared in one of his earlier books published probably 20 years ago.  In that event, Adams had a problem with a pager he had purchased and took it back to the store to complain about the quality of the equipment.  The associate who was tasked with assisting him quickly resolved the issue by correcting the orientation of the two AA batteries charged with powering the 90’s style communication device.  The point Adams made here was that as a successful author, cartoonist, entrepreneur, and all around intelligent guy, he was capable of exhibiting signs of “duh”, just like anyone else.  

So there I was.

My new toy wouldn’t behave, and I was doing some pretty stupid things trying to get it to start.  As if the mid-day heat and humidity wasn’t enough to smack me in the face to trigger an epiphany or two, my buddies Jeff and Scott helped me to see the light.

It wasn’t just any light, mind you.

It was that flashing green light that tells you the battery is charging when you put it on the charger.

Speaking of yellow bastards, I seem to have been joined in my bloggary by a wasp.

I’m not quite sure how it got in here, but I decided to invoke a glorious absence of sophistication to a painfully yellow nerf gun to resolve the matter.  As you may recall, that particular nerf gun was used many years ago to keep Junior in check and our beloved pit bull Hope irritated.

The staycation continues….