Enjoying the Fall

Fall is in full swing here, weather to die for. Lounge around on the deck in 75 degree kind of weather. I don't generally love fall, it's a season that just slides into winter way too easily. Winter is not fun. But I'm trying my hardest to enjoy this fall. I enjoyed another nice long walk Sunday. It's an easy way to get 7500 steps on the old pedometer. I speed walk and occasionally do a running spurt here and there to get the old ticker pumping. I tell you what, almost every single time I go walking I see one of these:

It's a wolf spider about the size of a tarantula you'd see in a pet shop. The spider itself is quite awesome and then you realize it's covered in its own offspring. I must have sat there crouched down looking at this thing for 5 minutes. I got a big blade of grass and stroked its abdomen watching the babies climb all over Ma in waves. Mother nature is awesome. They seem to like sunning themselves on the dirt roads along with every grasshopper in the vicinity.

The boys kept themselves busy working on the antique zero turn mower we own. It's ancient (like early 80's) and seems to always have some issue. We played around with the idea of buying a new zero turn mower last month, pricing them out and such. But in the end we don't really need to be spending money on something we already have. It's just the poor old thing seems to limp along every season. For instance at the current moment it needs to be jumped to get it started, hotwired since the starter seems to have died (kind of like a stolen car has to be started), the belt on one of the blades came off so it only mowed with two blades last time and the electric clutch crapped out so only half the lawn got mowed. It has issues. So Sean went and picked up the new electric clutch and installed it this weekend with Rich's help. The belt got fixed, he somehow fixed the starter issue and the blades were sharpened. Oh and he got the hour meter working again. It stopped at 990 hours nine years ago before we bought it from his parents. Should be interesting to see how many more hours we can get on it now that it's working again. Thanks handy husband and father-in-law, you're good to have around.