I hate lawnmowers

Okay, so my grandmother died in January. And like many northern Minnesotans, my family decided to wait to have a memorial service until May because her friends are snowbirds. One thing to know about my grandma is that she saved everything, like most good depression era people. I used to help her clean out the drawers in the kitchen and we'd find some hardware receipt from 1968 next to last week's TV Guide. It was all there. She also tried to get me to take things from her house. Not the family heirlooms of course, but things that she'd inherited from her dead friends. Furniture, pots and pans, tupperware, muffin mix from 1983, you know, the typical shit that people leave behind when they die. She outlived them all and suffered from some sort of complex that kept her from throwing anything away.

Now what does this have to do with lawnmowers? Well, I'll tell you. When my dad and aunt were going through the house, they asked my brother and I to make a list of what we wanted. I only wanted one thing (which of course I didn't get) and that was an old bookcase full of books from the late 1800s and early 1900s. I used to spend hours as a kid looking through those books. Since I didn't inherit the bookcase, the other thing I asked for was the lawnmower. See I'm cheap. I don't like to spend money on things that I won't really love. While I love having my lawn mowed, it is mostly weeds not grass, so I'm just not that into lawn care. I decide to ask for the Lawn Boy lawnmower, since it won't cost us a thing and it seems better than the other lawnmower that we got for free. It wasn't until I read the owners manual (with receipt and all) that I realized this lawnmower was purchased in 1978. It should've been a clue.

So when we get it home and it doesn't start, I call the lawnmower repair first person in the yellow pages. He seems nice enough. He takes the mower and tells me that the carburetor needs to be replaced. He says it won't be too expensive. $170 later (and two carburetors later), the damn thing still won't start. He's been back to my house 3 times now. Each time he tells us how great this lawnmower is. That if we went out to buy this same lawnmower today, it would cost $600. Funny thing, this old piece of crap lawnmower has cost me $170 and it still doesn't work. So now I'm really screwed because I just paid some guy to do work on a crappy mower when I could've just bought a new one. And the whole thing is making B and I pissed off. Not at each other, but really, we're just pissed and that's no fun.

Stay away from used lawnmowers. They are very very bad.