Sunday at The Land

There is no place on Earth that Southern Man would rather be than his ten acres northwest of The City. So what if there's nothing there but a workshop (still unfinished) and the old "temporary" woodshed (which is scheduled to be torn down and replaced with a larger one) and endless chores. Southern Man gets out there whenever he can. Today was spent working on an old riding lawn mower that hasn't been started in about five years and after much time and effort and repeated disassembly and cleaning and reassembly of carburetors and the expenditure of three cans of carb cleaner he finally got it running, only to have the motor seize up right at the end of the day. Damn. And he cleaned up a lot of debris from the flood of a few weeks ago and stacked a lot of driftwood in the to-be-processed-with-the-chainsaw pile and harvested several nice pieces of shale from the shoreline (he's collecting native rock for a goldfish pond, to be constructed out of a washout in mumble-mumble years) and generally had a most pleasant (if sweaty) afternoon. It'll be more pleasant once the new woodshed is up and the existing workshop is finished, though. Those are the major projects for this summer. Especially as finishing the workshop means running water and a working indoor toilet, which are still lacking at The Land at this time. And it looks like with the riding mower apparently dead Southern Man will absolutely have to find something to mow with this summer. That's actually the only real down side to The Land - about five acres of it has to be mowed on a fairly regular basis. But Southern Man would rather be out there mowing than sitting around Casa Southern Man with nothing better to do other than scheme about how to get Casa Southern Man out to The Land.