When I moved into my current dog house almost four years ago I decided to get a riding lawn mower. Well, I bought a 'barely' used riding mower that was real cute. I could hardly wait to drive it out to the front yard so my neighbors could see me and they would all want a riding mower like mine.

        Every time I cranked that sucker up and started for the front yard it would start smoking, start smelling and stop mowing before I could get out of the back yard! I am mechanically disadvantaged, but I did manage to find a burned up belt down in there and ordered a new one. As a matter of fact I was so smart I ordered two of them. It took me three days to get that old burned up belt off and replace it with a new one.

        I cranked the mower up again and the new belt promptly burned up about half way to the front yard. This time it took me only two days to replace the belt and by this time my weeds were getting pretty tall. I thought, "Well, I will mow the back yard first." This time it ran almost fifteen minutes before the third belt burned up!

        When I called the gentleman I had purchased the mower from and in between sobs told him what had been happening he apologized profusely and offered to take the mower back and return my money! After carefully considering his offer I reluctantly agreed! (Ha!) Sometimes I do get lucky!!!!

        A few days later when I was about to try to crank up my fifteen year old Toro mower, a landscape artist by the name of Jesus showed up and wanted to take care of my yard. His English was at least as bad as my Spanish, but with lots of hand signals, grinning and a mix of poor Spanish and English we came to an agreement that he would do it for $30 a week. Then he took a look at my wore-out mower, grinned some more and asked me if I would sell it to him.

        It took a while with some more hand signals, waving, grinning and struggles with languages, but he accepted my price of $100. Then he grin some more and said (I think), "I mow yard three times for it." Well, I am kinda dumb, but I'm not real stupid, but since that mower wasn't worth more than $5 I decided to let that $10 discrepancy pass and told him OK. He understood "OK" real good and grinned some more. I grinned back at him because I knew that ole Toro wasn't going to last for three mowings without being overhauled.

        My next venture was to buy a super duper floor cleaner that would not only vacuum the floor, but would scrub it plum clean too. It worked real good for a while, but it then decided to start leaking water all over the floor. When I took it back to the seller I found that the cost to repair it was as almost as much as a new vacuum. So I got shed of that sucker in a garage sale that my neighbor had for $5. Never did get the money though because my neighbor has a bad memory.

        Went to Sears and got a real good (cheap) vacuum cleaner. It picks up dog hair real good! Don't have to worry about dirt on the floor because I talked the dawgs into wiping their feet clean before they come inside. Now if I could just get them to stop shedding hair I would have it made!

        And last but not least I got me a new computer when I moved into the dog house. Lightning struck nearby a few months ago and killed my modem. Called computer guru and got lucky (I think). I got him to double the computer memory... Now I need to get MY memory doubled. I watched him open up the computer so I could do that, but have already forgotten how he did it!

        Was thinking about getting one of those I-Pod things, but decided I would just keep on using my wind-up Victrola!