To Blow Or Not To Blow...

This is usually not a difficult decision for me to have to make, but this time, unfortunately, we are talking about yard work... raking leaves to be exact.

That's what The Bald Monkey and I did this weekend. Yup, truly exciting stuff happens around here all of the time... *yawn*

Well, anyway, this weekend, we did some yard work. You see, we have trees. Lots and lots of trees. They are great in the summertime since they shade the house and keep cooling costs down. However, come Autumn, when the trees start going bald, they drop mountains of leaves all over the yard. We have to rake every weekend from October through December to keep up.

This year, we thought that we would move into the 21st century, and get all high-tech on the leaf situation. We bought a Black and Decker leaf hog. It is a leaf blower and a leaf vacuum all in one. While standing in line at the local Home Depot, grand and glorious visions formed in our heads. Visions of turning this baby on and then instantly, all of the thousands of leaves that were previously scattered all throughout the yard would miraculously all blow into the air all tornado-like and then all float gently into a neat little pile right in the middle of our front yard. Then, all we would have to do is switch the new miracle tool to the vacuum setting and all of the leaves would be sucked right on into the tube and turned into mounds of fantastic mulch. Yeah, this was gonna be cool all right!

We got the new leaf sucker/blower home, plugged it in, turned it on and... well, it just kinda blew all the leaves around in circles from one end of the yard to the other. As hard as we tried, we could not get the leaves to cooperate with our grandiose visions. They refused to all pile up in a neat and orderly fashion! They just sorta blew up into the air and spun around and floated back down to the ground in just about the same place where they started. It also blew a bunch of dust and dirt all around in the air stinging our eyes and making us sneeze out dirty, nasty top-soil snot. Yech! What a huge disappointment!

Well, at least we still had the vacuuming portion of our dream to look forward to! We got the boring, uninspired, old-fashioned rakes out of the shed and started scooping up the leaves into a pile. When we had enough of them all gathered around, we switched on the Leaf Hog and started to suck those babies right up! However, after about six or seven leaves got sucked up the tube, the Leaf Hog got jammed and wouldn't suck up any more leaves! We figured that, obviously, we must have just sucked up an extra large or especially difficult to swallow leaf, so we unclogged it and started again. Six or seven leaves later... clogged again!

We gave up on the leaf blower and went back to raking leaves the old-fashioned way...

I only wish now that I had been smart enough to invent the leaf blower! Everybody is buying them. Everyone on my street has one, and no one can figure out how to make them do a doggone thing. All they do is blow all of the leaves up in the air and spin them all around in a circle and drop them right back down where they started from. Someone is making a fortune and laughing all the way to the bank.

Oh yeah, and don't even get me started on my rant about the weed whacker...