Here was my plan for yesterday: get up early, cook breakfast for my wife, get a blog post written, take care of the boy for a bit, mother-in-law comes over at 10 to take over childcare responsibilities, mow front and back yard, get letter of recommendation written during boy’s nap, go to work, get home around midnight, go to bed.

This should not have been complicated.

Yesterday was very stupid, and hopefully this will be entertaining enough that you get to laugh at what an asshole of a day I had yesterday.  That said, I fully expect yesterday’s bullshit to find a way to bleed over into today, so this will probably be long and boring and dreary and not funny at all.

Anyway.  The first four items went well.  You’ve already seen breakfast, I wrote a blog post, and the boy and I played with his new cars for a couple of hours (I’ll talk about that tomorrow).  Then my mother-in-law showed up to watch the boy while I mowed.  All hell broke loose.

My lawn (both the front and the back) were both longer than I wanted them to be.  Days where I have the time to mow have been lining up damn near perfectly with days where it is raining, which makes it difficult to get the lawn mowed.  It rained on Wednesday, hard.  I could have mowed on Thursday, which was my day off, but the ground was still soaked so I gave it another day to dry out.  Over 24 hours with no rain and generally sunny conditions should be enough to dry the lawn out, right?

No, of course not.  The grass was still wet as hell at 10:15 when I got outside, and I wanted to bag the lawn this time, making it twice as annoying.  I was having to stop to empty the bag every three or four passes, meaning I generated two full bags of clippings (six bag-emptyings) on a lawn that I can normally mow in less than twenty minutes.

This was merely annoying, and not angrymaking, right up until the part where I tried to restart the mower after emptying a bag and it died immediately.

The fuck?  I’d just changed the gas and checked the oil; no way either of those were a problem.

Wait, the grass is wet.  Is the blade stuck?  Dammit.  I turn the mower over (some of you are chuckling right now) and look, and sure enough, the blade’s stuck behind a big-ass clump of grass.  I clear it and spin the blade a couple of times.  Jam’s cleared.  I right the mower.

Context:  this is my mower.  It’s got an electric start assist, meaning that you can start it by pulling the cord or you can just push a button.  I was told when I bought it that that was so that you could still start it if the battery was dead.

I push the button.  There’s a puff of white smoke and then nothing happens.

Oh fuck me.  White smoke.  I just fucking flooded something, didn’t I?  (Note: I assumed this meant oil.  I know nothing– nothing– about engines; that may or may not be true.)  Son of a bitch.

Off to read manuals and look around.  I find no useful information and decide to run my edger for a bit and just let the thing sit to drain off whatever I just poured into the wrong place while I had the mower on its side.  I realize that this isn’t going to work, but I do it anyway.

Twenty minutes later, not only does pushing the button do absolutely nothing— no clicks, no clacks, no white smoke– but the pull cord is jammed as fuck and won’t move at all.

I’m going to spare you the details of the diagnosis.  It involved my computer, my phone, both the manuals that came with the mower, removing the plastic case from around the motor, attempting to remove the enclosure that the pull cord goes into and promptly stripping a bolt (this happens each and every time I try and take bolts off of something; my socket wrench eats metal like nothing I’ve ever seen), plugging the mower into the wall to make sure the battery isn’t dead (it’s supposed to need a recharge once a month; the indicator light was green), pulling the battery and the fuse out of the back of the mower to see if the fuse is blown (it wasn’t), spending half a fucking hour trying to get the battery back into the goddamn mower which requires some sort of unholy plastic Tetris origami HOW THE FUCK DID THIS THING FIT IN HERE JESUS bullshit that at one point had me kicking the hell out of the battery compartment on my month-old $400 mower until I came to my senses and stopped– also, the battery is behind the plastic shield that covers the vent into the bag, which is rigged like a mousetrap– so I was trying to do all this one-handed until I smartened up and braced the shield with a yardstick.

Maybe it’s the spark plug?   I have no way to get the spark plug off the front of the mower and no way to “check” and/or “adjust” the “gap,” a phrase I have only the haziest understanding of anyway.

Fuck it, I gotta go to the hardware store.

I get in the car and go to the hardware store. It’s now noon; I was wanting to have the whole lawn done by now, front and back, and I’ve got the front lawn half-mowed and a bunch of bullshit all over the place.  Halfway there I notice that I’m damn near out of gas, so I pull into a gas station.

I don’t have my wallet.  HULK SMASH.  It occurs to me that blowing up a gas station would be a nice, quick way to end my day.

I don’t kill anyone.  I drive home and get my wallet.  For some reason, I take a different route and go straight to the hardware store, bypassing the gas station. I decide, to avoid potential nonsense later on (and because this is not the first time I have had a day like this while trying to fix something) I am going to buy every single goddamn thing I can think of that might be part of the problem because fuck it if I don’t need it right now it can just break later.

The list: new fuse, new spark plug, gapping tool (whatever that is), spark plug wrench, motor oil, steel wool.

I find everything but the fuse and the gapping tool.  I decide to hell with the gapping tool; if the gap is the problem I’m just going to replace the spark plug with the new one.  Where the hell’s the fuse?  There are mower fuses by the mowers but they aren’t even close to the right amperage.  There are 40-amp fuses by the auto parts section but they’re roughly eight times too big.  I literally have the guy at Ace pull the fuse from their floor model of my mower so that we can compare it.  We look around some more.  It’s not here.  He tries to order one.  I’m spitting blood at this point.

He can’t even order the right size fuse.  He suggests I go to the auto parts store down the road.  I don’t destroy the universe– I actually like the people at Ace, and I figure that dismantling a floor model mower so that you can make sure I’m buying the right fuse (because I forgot to take a picture of the damn thing before leaving home) counts as sufficient customer devotion to not go nuclear on him for something that isn’t actually his fault.

Still gotta check out, though, and the lady in front of me is creating an amazing amount of drama over a two-dollar difference in the price of the item she wants to buy and what’s coming up on the register.  Apparently somebody left a sale tag on something that wasn’t supposed to be there anymore?  I dunno, but apparently that two damn bucks for what appeared to be a decorative solar lawn light were the difference between her kids eating and starving to death.  I am not in the goddamn mood for this.  It’s now nearly one, I’ve not had lunch yet, and I still have to not only finish buying things but then go home and fix my mower and finish mowing the lawn before I can go to work for what I already knew was gonna be one of the busiest shifts of the year– Father’s Day weekend is bananas.  (Tonight would normally be worse; it’s raining.  Again.)

I damn near give her two dollars.  She solves her problem, finally.  I buy my shit.

I go to the auto parts store down the road.  I find the fuse relatively easy, but then have to put up with Autozone’s absolutely unbelievably bad customer service, where a guy literally waves me over to check me out and then just walks away without saying anything.  What the hell?  Why did I just get out of that line?   Why are there people just bellying up to the counter like we’re in a goddamn bar and not a civilized store where there are supposed to be lines, and why did you wave me over when you were gonna go someplace?  What the fucking hell?

I’m three seconds from leaving a five on the counter and taking off when he finally comes back.  He doesn’t want to sell me my $3 pack of fuses without my zip code and phone number.

No.  Fuck you.

I drive home and start replacing shit.  Turns out?  It’s the fuse.  The fuse that I didn’t think was blown when I looked at it an hour ago is really clearly obviously blown when I pull it the second time.  I put everything back together, managing to not kick the hell out of the battery compartment this time, and the mower actually starts.  I finish mowing the front lawn, trim some shit, and then go inside to shower and go to work because it is way too late to get anything else done.

At work, every single video game I walk past all night immediately breaks.  In one case, the damn thing actually fixes itself after I give up and hang an Out of Order on it and walk away; I find kids playing the extra credits I put on it when I was testing it out half an hour later.  Best guess?  It overheated somehow.  It’s never overheated once in the last six years, but whatever.

At the end of the night, I check my bank account balance for no good reason other than I’m waiting out my last customers and I’m bored, and I note that the hardware store has double-charged me for the stuff I bought.

The end.

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EDIT THE FIRST:  Hah.  Just looked at yesterday’s post and noticed this sentence:  “Hopefully I can get the lawn stuff kicked out of the way with a quickness…”

Fuck you, yesterday me.

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EDIT THE SECOND:  I just walked out into the kitchen and told my wife that this post was up.  Her response: “Did you tell them about the tree conversation?”

Sigh: