Sometimes I can't lose for winning.

Yesterday the lawn mower crapped out on me in the back yard so I decided to take a look at it. I'm generally pretty good with things but when I removed a couple of bolts they were awfully long and the minute they came out several layers of parts, including the carburetor fell off into a pile on the mower deck.


I seriously considered throwing the whole damned thing away. In the meantime I wondered what to do about the way-back part of the yard I was cleaning up.

Later on that evening I was visiting a friend and mentioned what had happened and he offered me an old mower. "It ran the last time I used it," he said.

"Where was that?" I asked, dryly. "Appomattox Courthouse to give General Lee a nice place to surrender at?"

"It's been a while," he confessed but it ran OK and you're welcome to it. Try using ether to get it going."

Figuring I had nothing left to lose, I took it.

The next morning I went to the auto parts place and bought a new plug for the mower I had been given the night before along with 4 cans of starting ether.

When I got home I changed the plug, filled the tank with fresh fuel,  squirted a shot of ether into the carb and yanked the cord several times. It lit up and ran for about 10 or 15 seconds. I looked and saw fuel leaking out of the carb and wrote the mower off as junk.

Later in the morning I was running an errand and passed a shop that had a reputation for being gougers but on impulse stopped in anyway. Seems they had new management or something. I described the problem to the guy who stopped me about halfway  and said, "Sounds like a job for the carburetor queen." 

In a second I was describing the problem to a little redhead girl and she simply told me that I needed a new carb and that it looked like a $50-$60 job.

I looked at her hands and they were dainty, small fingered and nimble and knew that she was likely a girl with a mechanical bent and good hands for small parts. I wished my doctor's hands were that small.

I went home and tossed the mower in the back of the pickup and dropped it off after she said it looked like it would be good to go on Monday.

Two hours later I got a call to pick up the now repaired mower and 

I did and took it home.

When I got it home I put it in the garage and looked at the old mower I had been given and had given up on. I noticed that the mower deck had dried off and curiosity overwhelmed me. I looked in the gas tank and it was half full. 

The carb wasn't leaking. I grabbed the starting cord and gave it a half hearted pull and the mower lit right off and ran like a top. I let it run a while and if ran like a top.

I can't win some days and I can't lose other days.

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html