I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Part II

In an earlier post, I related how I’m the not sharpest knife in the drawer…but somehow I seem to know how to find it and stick myself with it anyway.

In today’s post, I relate how I’m just not the sharpest knife in the drawer, period. To wit or for lack of wit, my mechanical stupidity or just plain stupidity when it comes to our lawn mower.

Two years ago when we moved, it was our first time with an actual lawn. Before we had been in apartments with only a gravel driveway, which we didn’t have to take care of — and which for that matter, our landlord didn’t seem to think he did either, especially during the winters, but I digress, nay, ramble…

But now with a small house in a country town, we have an actual lawn, both front and back. So we bought a lawn mower.

First time out, I ran over a down spout and then had to shear it off with a hacksaw, which I borrowed from a neighbor and which also promptly fell apart.

Since then, I haven’t done much better.

Once I couldn’t figure out why grass was getting stuck underneath the mower. I kept looking and looking underneath the mower.

Can you tell the subtle difference between this:

and this:

I couldn’t– until almost an hour later when it dawned on me that I needed to switch this thingamabob OPEN to let the grass go out of the OPENING.

Then to top it all off, or most of this summer, I lost a screw that held the handle together and never replaced it. Instead, I kept using random sticks from our yard or our neighbor’s yard that would fit through the holes to keep the handle together.

Finally, this past weekend, I broke down and asked my neighbor Simon to help me out. Here’s what he used to fix it:

It was quite a concept. I wish I had thought of that instead of putting in a new stick every time an old one broke. It only happened about three or four (dozen) times every time I mowed the lawn, so instead of it taking me an hour to mow the entire lawn, it would end up taking an hour and half.

The worse thing was while he was putting the nut, bolt and washers to help secure the handle, somehow I confused the nut and the bolt in my mind and called the nut “the bolt” and the bolt “the nut.” Even though I corrected myself, I imagined Simon saying to himself, “Uh huh, just what I thought, he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

This past weekend, I happened to see Simon and he asked me how the mower was working now. I almost wanted to respond, “Hey, I know my ass from a hole in the ground,” but I knew I’d probably say that wrong too: “I know my hole from an ass in the ground.” So I just said, “Fine. Thanks.”

____________________________________________________

Visit Humor-Blogs.com for folks who, for the most part, are pretty sharp knives in or out of their drawers– uh, whatever that means.