Lazy Sunday

Today is Sunday and my yard needs mowing. I was going to mow the yard yesterday, but I was hit by a serious case of don’t-give-a-damn. I decided to put off mowing until today. However, today is so quiet, so peaceful, that I hate to fire up the lawn tractor. The decibel rating from the lawn tractor’s puny 15.5 HP engine belies its small size. It sounds like a B-17 revving up its four engines and getting ready for takeoff. The outside temperature is only 82°F at 3:45 PM (2:45 by the sun) and a breeze wafts gently through my front window on its way to my back door. There is a lawn mower running somewhere in the neighborhood. I hear it but the sound is muted. There are no barking dogs to destroy the serenity of my neighborhood. There never are.

My yard is crisscrossed with mole tunnels. It makes for a rough ride on the lawn tractor. It bounces around as it traverses the mole tunnels, tilting this way and that. Nevertheless, I’ll put that thing in high gear and drive like I’m the Mario Andretti of lawn tractors.

The lawn mower I heard running somewhere nearby is no longer running and quietude settles on the neighborhood. Today would have been a good day to mow. Tomorrow will be about 10 degrees warmer. But then, that’s what air conditioners are for. I’ll take a swipe at the front yard and if I get too hot, I’ll come inside, mix a big mug of lemonade, and enjoy the coolness. Then I’ll go back out and mow the back yard. I don’t see me using the string trimmer tomorrow, but it has been known to happen.

Travels

My late cousin’s wife loves to travel, especially overseas. She has been to many countries in Europe and was most recently in London. Her plans will soon take her to Sicily (she’s been there before) and then on to four more countries. I can’t recall all their names but I know Nepal is one of them. I think another one is Bhutan, which makes sense because it borders Nepal so it’s right there in the neighborhood.

You can see sights over there that you can’t see in the USA. But America is a vast country and it borders another vast country—Canada. There are so many places and things to see in America. You could spend years traveling in America and not run out of places to see. People come here from all over the world to see just a few of these amazing places.

I’ve done some traveling in America. I’ve driven over the Rocky Mountains and down into the city of Red Lodge, Montana. I drove through Yellowstone Park and watched Old Faithful spouting and visited the beautiful, colorful hot springs. I camped in New York’s Adirondack mountains and swam in its crystal clear lakes. I’ve driven west across the Great Plains with its seemingly endless grasslands that extend to the horizon in every direction, and I’ve driven east across the southwestern deserts of America. I’ve driven through redwood forests in California and through beautiful Glacier Park in Montana. I’ve driven down the Pacific Coast Highway from Crescent City to Los Angeles. (On the way, I picked up a hitchhiking “biker chick” on a street corner in San Francisco and gave her a ride to L.A.) I’ve driven from Ventura to Thousand Oaks and on eastward into L.A. on the Ventura Freeway.

I happened to drive through Winslow, Arizona, just when that great Eagles song, Take It Easy, was playing on the radio. (“Well, I'm a standing on a corner In Winslow, Arizona / And such a fine sight to see / It's a girl, my lord / In a flatbed Ford / Slowin' down to take a look at me…”)

I sat on a mountaintop west of Denver and watched darkness descend on the city as the sun set behind the mountain I camped on. I watched the million lights of Denver sparkle into brightness. Lest you think I’m all nature-lover, I will add that the best stripper I’ve ever seen danced at a club in Denver! But that’s another story.

I walked beside the Grand Canyon and the Arizona meteor crater. I drove the Embarcadero along San Francisco Bay (torn down now, I think) to eat seafood in a dockside restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. I took a cable car to the top of Mount Sandia in New Mexico. (The Mount Sandia Tramway is the third longest in the world.) There is a restaurant on the top of the mountain and I ate dinner there.

I visited Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. It’s beautiful, but so is the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I stood beside Niagara Falls and I walked out on a platform far above the Niagara River.

I hiked into Linville Gorge (sometimes called “the Grand Canyon of North Carolina”) and walked beside the Linville River for hours before setting up camp for the night. When I ran out of water, I drank crystal clear spring water that dripped from a huge boulder beside the river and I filled my water bottle with it. It was the most delicious water I’ve ever tasted! In Boone, North Carolina, I spent time in a house on a mountaintop. The city of Boone lay far below and when dawn arrived I found myself looking down on surrounding mountains with their valleys shrouded in early morning fog.

I stood on a beach at Hilton Head, South Carolina, and looked across the ocean waters to see the tops of buildings seemingly rising out of the water. I was seeing the tops of buildings in Savannah, Georgia, just over the horizon.

If I tried to list of all the great places I’ve been to in America, this blog post would indeed be a very long one. So I won’t do that. I simply want to point out that if it’s within your budget, you can visit many interesting places and do many interesting things without leaving America, without getting a passport, without contending with foreign languages you don’t speak, and without spending long hours on a passenger jet. And there is this: while places around the world may seem exotic to you, for the people who live in those places, America is the exotic land.

A/C Restored

In my last post I described the failure of my air conditioner. So I feel I should assure my readers that the one-week heat wave did not kill me and the a/c has been restored.

I bought an LG brand a/c. Some reviews said the LG unit was loud, and indeed it is somewhat noisier than my old GE unit. It also weighs less. Some of the parts, such as fans, are plastic instead of metal. The compressor is half the size of the compressor on the old GE unit.

A friend who lives near me, and his son and grandson, came to my house and installed the new unit. Actually, they began the installation: they carried the old unit to the back of my yard and put the new unit into the window opening. (The old unit was gone within 36 hours—picked up by a recycler.) Although the new a/c, like the old a/c, has side curtains designed to seal off the remainder of the window opening, they are nowhere near sufficient. So my friend returned the next day and we cut boards to fit into the side openings and caulked them and painted them, then we used joint compound to repair the inside of the window opening where winter air leaking in for years had destroyed some of the plaster.

The new LG has a remote control so I can operate the a/c without walking over to it. I guess that is progress of a sort, although I never considered walking across the room to be a terrible burden.

So my house baked in upper-90s heat while it was without a/c, but now that the a/c is restored, the temperature hasn’t gotten high enough to need an a/c. Today, for example, the high temperature was 77°. This is similar to the way the city’s tornado sirens operate. Sometimes in bad weather the city blows a tornado siren 100 feet from my house. The siren is loud enough to make you jump out of your skin. But it works. Every time that siren blows, the tornadoes stay away. The principle seems to be universal. I keep something I never need for 20 years and then one day I toss it out; the next day I need it. I pay $600 for an air conditioner and the outside temperature drops 20 degrees. I don’t know about you, but that’s the way the Universe has always worked for me.