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Plus mowing a lawn is meditative Copying another comment I made earlier When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my l
by paradox460 2mo ago
Plus mowing a lawn is meditative
Copying another comment I made earlier
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
- sealthedeal 2mo agoThere is something beautiful about getting hands dirty with actual dirt/earth. Its such a REAL feeling.
- edoceo 2mo agoA friend of a friend got sick of tech work. Now she bills out at $70-120/hr doing garden and landscaping work. Not her crew, just her. Solo work on nice houses. Not lawn-mowing, landscaping. Very dirty every day. If I had a job I'd be jealous.
- grebc 2mo agoI bought a real stinker of place to renovate & of course the yard is completely overgrown. Every wo/man and their dog is telling me to knock it down, have a bobcat to clear the yard and start fresh. I enjoy the work of clearing a yard by hand, and slowly cleaning the place up.
- girvo 2mo agoGardening is my stress reliever for this reason. Though going to war with pests is… less stress relieving sometimes.
- hbn 2mo agoI'm not much of a workaholic, I don't really like going outside or getting my hands dirty... But mowing the lawn is nice. It's like doing a giant coloring page with a big thick marker. The past couple of years I've lived in a place with no lawn to mow and I miss it.
- wlesieutre 2mo agoNiceness of lawn mowing is very climate dependent. Around 70 degrees I don’t mind it. Different story when it’s 98. Unenjoyable, and my electric motor’s batteries die twice as fast in the heat, so I have to do it two days in a row instead of being able to get it over with. But I don’t hate it quite enough to blow hundreds of dollars on extra batteries or to pay someone else to do it.
- inigyou 2mo agoI once had an electric lawnmower with a cord on it. Swaps one inconvenience for another. You don't have to recharge it, but you have to keep the cord out of the way.
- locusofself 2mo agoI've had both. I'd rather have battery operated, especially if you have a big yard. Having an extra backup battery is a good idea as well.
- b112 2mo agoTime to get a Personalized Pico Pal(tm), your own Power Pal in orbit, solar power microwaved to your mower, from now on it's batteries included, thanks to Blazbro!
- account42 2mo agoHow about attaching a generator to the corded electric lawnmower. That would solve both the long cable and charging problems.
- leftnode 2mo agoAbsolutely agree. I could easily afford to hire a lawn crew to cut my lawn, but I enjoy doing it every weekend or two for similar reasons. I have a little under half an acre to mow, but I still enjoy doing it manually with a push mower. Gets me outside and moving, accomplishes something tangible, can catch up on a podcast or two or just get lost in my thoughts, often leads to fixing other odds and ends around the house I've put off.
- cortesoft 2mo agoI would agree with you if I wasn't so allergic to grass.
- Modified3019 2mo agoFunny enough the parts of the lawn that are still grass are what force me to go out and mow it before the seed heads start spewing pollen. Though if you’re allergic to the hay too (curiously, I’m not) you have my sincere sympathies. That said, even if I didn’t have bad grass pollen allergies, I’d still have to keep the grass from getting too big because deer/dog ticks will start to host there, especially with all the critters we have running around. Most of my yard (not tiny, but not big either) is clover/legumes now, and I only mow it once it’s seeded and matured, to encourage a new flush of flowers for the bees/flies/beetles and such. As a bonus the clover tends to push out the catsear too. I’m also fond of my mint patch, and all the little mint moths fluttering about it.
- inigyou 2mo agoFun fact: people are not "allergic" to pollen, they are having a legitimate immune reaction to pollen deploying enzymes that cut up proteins in your respiratory tract. This is because pollen is "designed" to chop up similar proteins when it lands on a flower.
- cortesoft 2mo agoIt’s all parts of the grass, and most trees, plus myriad other things. My legs always itch if I walk outside in nature wearing shorts. When I did the test where they poke you with a box of allergens on the back, my entire back was basically reacting. I am currently doing weekly shots in an attempt to fix the issue.
- vel0city 2mo ago> Plus mowing a lawn is meditative Not when its >100F and >30%RH and a bright sun in the sky.
- mc32 2mo agoThat’s what evenings are for…
- vel0city 2mo agoThe 100F time is already the late afternoon/early evening. Am I supposed to mow in the dark when its 98F? Or should I wait until 1 AM to mow? I'm sure my neighbors will love it. At least with the extreme heat the grass doesn't grow quite as fast.
- BHSPitMonkey 2mo agoThere's always sunrise
- sgerenser 2mo agoYeah sunrise, when the lawn is soaking wet with dew.
- 8note 2mo agoshould you really have a grass lawn at that point? you might want something more native to those conditions that doesnt take much upkeep
- tharkun__ 2mo agoIt's not enjoyable in 80+ with RH 60%+ either. Grass grows pretty well. Too well actually but mowing it stinks. In the morning the grass is still wet and sticky. By the time you can mow it properly, the sun is blaring down on top of this. The afternoon time is worst as things have heated up considerably. When the sun is out of the way, the mosquitos come out and make it even more unenjoyable.
- axus 2mo agoI always thought this song was about mowing the lawn during tough times, but apparently not: https://genius.com/The-all-american-rejects-move-along-lyrics https://genius.com/The-all-american-rejects-move-along-lyric...
- order-matters 2mo ago[dead]
- hapticmonkey 2mo agoReminds me of this Kurt Vonnegut quote: > “(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.” Sometimes efficiency is not the point.
- ohyoutravel 2mo agoSo funny. I need to make a monthly HOA payment. The bank is about a half mile away. I write a check every month at home, I walk to the bank, see random things in the neighborhood on the way, see a fire truck, see the little toddlers from the Montessori school on a leash with safety vests (always makes me smile), fill out a deposit slip, chat with the teller at the bank during the deposit, get a coffee and sit outside, walk home. What a fun little adventure! My wife finally convinced me to just do the online, recurring payment every month. I definitely miss the physical act of walking the check to the tiny town bank every month. Vonnegut definitely resonates.
- cortesoft 2mo agoThis is why I order the envelopes online and then go for a walk.
- paradox460 2mo agoIndeed. I'll drive all the way to the city, to visit a store to buy a pair of pants or something (what I'm buying doesn't matter) My wife doesn't understand why I don't just buy them online. I know my size, I know the style I want, and I know the company sells em online. But it's not about the item. It's about tossing on a podcast, or seeing something new, or even just getting mad at someone in traffic for cutting me off. The journey is often more important than the destination
- RajT88 2mo agoI love all manner of yard work. My wife says it is like living in an Animal Crossing house, with me always wandering around the yard with various things - shovels, fishing rods, buckets, rakes, chainsaws, grass seed, etc.
- pretzellogician 2mo agoI love working outdoors. And mowing is meditative... some of the time. Until I encounter a yellowjacket nest.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Yhippa 2mo agoAfter a bad day of work I've noticed that driving a manual transmission car helps me from stewing about it as opposed to driving an automatic where my mind can wander more often.