mow problems, less money

and so the saga continues…

…so, in addition to the legal shit:

(the malibu deadline being friday, the speeding ticket, etc)

actually, there is no “etc” – that’s pretty much it. i’d mentioned the speeding ticket, don’t know about the malibu – in a nutshell, the city has declared it a junk vehicle, so i have from thirty days of them telling me (which that thirty days is this friday) to get rid of it. the problem? it’s not titled to me, but rather uncle arturo, and i haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it. guess i should call the city about that.

moving on…

so, the “get my ass a lawnmower” saga continues…

it started a couple weeks ago when i went to one of those guys that has a used car lot near the airport and may or not may be in this country legally. he doesn’t speak english. but somehow speaks it well enough to negotiate price. the mower i liked of his had a bit of a hiccup in the engine (i figure a bad spark plug?) but i wasn’t too sure, so i went exploring.

i’m a fan of buying shit like this from pawn shops, so i hit a few – first one was on airport in the heart of the hood, but traffic was shit due to fantasy road construction (my term for when they block off half the road for miles, but all you see is a coned off lane – no equipment, no workers, than BAM – traffic is free to move again…seriously? what the fuck?) so i passed.

next was “my” pawn shop, by our highway 183 shop – i’ve bought a couple bikes, a few guns, and my tv there. great guys. two mowers there – both self-propelled (which i don’t really want) but both appeared to be good quality…until i moved the lower priced of the two and saw oil. we looked under to see it was seeping from the main spindle where the blade attached, which is the worse place for it to be. we tried to start it and it locked up. the other one was about $50 out of my price range (i’m trying to keep this around $100) so i was done there.

then came the ritzy pawn shop near the ufc’s place: all push mowers were $300 or more save for one, and that one didn’t look like it would fit in my car. so, again, i was done there. nice shop, though…

so finally i ended up at the pawn shop in lockhart on wednesday. i had driven by a few times and not seen any mowers out front, than i noticed a metric crap ton in the back, which it turns out is where they keep them so they don’t walk away. there were several nice ones that wouldn’t start, and then one pretty crappy one that would. we negotiated down to a flat eighty bucks and it again wouldn’t fit in my car but a nice local guy let me load it in his truck and he drove it back to my place for me.

all seemed well.

when i had started it at the pawn shop the engine, for lack of a better term, throbbed. the owner attributed that to bad gas as it had sat for quite a while, which made sense, so i just filled it with fresh gas and set to mowing…but the “throbbing” didn’t stop. in fact, it got worse. it died on me. a lot. it just sounded like it wasn’t getting gas, so i removed the air intake and saw the throttle spring, so i tweaked it to get it more fuel. i fired right back up, but still had the same issue but now ran a bit more solid and burned a WHOLE lot more fuel. with my last three mowers, and the one i borrowed from JAB, i used one tank of gas to do the front yard. with this bad throbbing bitch it took almost three.

fuck all that.

fortunately it came with a thirty day guarantee so it went back in less than twenty-four hours. the good news? the front yard looks good again. the down side? the search continues, and the backyard is still tall enough to lose budnik in.

and here we go again!

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