Lawn Mowers and Fast Food

Hey, what's up? Welcome to another episode of the Book of Donovan. I'm going to, I don't know, I may make this one a little shorter. I don't, I really don't know. I've got a couple of items on my list that I wanted to talk about. Today is September 21st, 2026. I don't know what day of alcohol retirement this is. It's like 1,200 and something. Hang on, I'll go check.

And through the magic of editing, that took no time at all. 1,215, that is 1,215th day of alcohol retirement. Two day. All right. So I don't know about you, but I have a yard that's large enough that, and I'm not boasting, it's only 0.97 acres.

And you're probably thinking, well, shit, Donovan, that's not a large yard. And you would be correct. It's not considered a large yard. My home place, the place I was, well, it wasn't where I was born and raised, but it's where I live from like 1976 until we moved over here in 2006.

But anyway, the place we affectionately called The Cottage, I sold it a few years ago, and it was 1.97 acres, so it was almost two acres. And for a number of years, we actually had a lawnmower, a tractor-style lawnmower that had a 52-inch cutting deck on it.

So yeah, I used the three blades and it was the type that you had to snatch the deck out from under it, flip it upside down, change the blades out, and then put it all back together. So everything went fairly quickly. And then after my mom passed away in 2019 and I had to start taking care of the property, I bought a 42 inch mower that I just kept over there.

And it literally would take me somewhere between three and four hours if I didn't run into any problems. Okay, so that's kind of the correlation between the size of yard that I have where we live now from 2006 as compared to the one that I used to live.

And to be fair, the lawnmower that I have today is a riding lawnmower made by Troy Built, and it's only a 30-inch cutting deck. And the reason why I chose a 30-inch cutting deck is because my backyard is fenced in with a privacy fence and the gates are only wide enough for something like a 30-inch lawnmower to even get through it.

So though I wanted something with a larger cutting deck, I just couldn't do it without having to basically redesign the gates, which I'm going to do eventually because of that north side section of the privacy fence that we had to tear down.

so they could cut down all these trees and then we had to rebuild it. I was not in a position at the time to put the gate in, but I now have a plan in the next five years, hopefully, that I'll take one of those eight foot sections and turn it into a double gate and then that way I can get a larger lawnmower, et cetera, et cetera.

And you may be asking me, why the hell are you telling me all about this when it comes to lawnmowers and cutting the grass? Well, slow you roll, dude. I'm going to tell you. So, I bought this lawnmower in 2015, and so it is getting a little long in the tooth, and I routinely, about once a year, once every two years, I have a company here called Chris's Moor Clinic.

They will come pick it up, they will service it, and then they'll bring it back. And that's one of the main reasons why I use them is because I don't have a way of getting this lawnmower to them. And so it's had some issues as it's getting older.

One of the issues that I keep fighting with is the safety switches that's on it. You know, there's a safety switch that if the, on the mower deck itself, on the, oh shit, what do you call that?

The exhaust, the, you know what I'm talking about. It's where the grass actually comes out. And you normally have a cover. You can either have a mulching cover, which essentially covers the hole and actually makes your yards look a lot better, or you have the standard chute that just throws the grass out.

And there is a safety switch there that if that thing is not screwed down properly or is completely removed, which is the point, it will not let you engage the blade. It will cut the mower off. By the same token, there's another safety switch on the unit that if your clutch is not, a clutch slash brake is not in a locked position, you can't crank the lawnmower up and be off the seat.

So anyway, long story short, time before last, before this past Friday, I had finished up the yards. I had parked the lawnmower so I could blow it off. And then I went to crank it up to try to, you know, put it up. and it wouldn't crank up. So I was like, I was hot. I was sweaty. I was tired. I said, fuck this.

I'll just push it in and deal with it later. Well, later came this past Friday. And so I started looking through all of the safety switches and hell, I even tried to ask the LLMs, you know, can you help me bypass this? And they said no, because they're safety switches. And I'm like, well, I own the goddamn thing. It was like, I don't care. You really don't need to do that.

so I'm not going to help you. And I'm like, holy shit. So anyway, as I'm working on this kind of stuff, I eventually discover, probably half an hour, 45 minutes into this, I discovered the real reason why the lawnmower is not cranking. The lead to the positive battery post had corroded through. Without the positive and negative battery leads being connected, you know what the lawnmower

can't do, crank up. And so that was the issue. So I had gone inside to get some baking soda, to put in some water in a spritz bottle and all of that. Well, my son, Tyler, who is moving back to take a job opportunity here back in Tifton, he overheard me. So he came out to see what was going on. And so he and I together, finally, we cleaned it as best we could. We had the bolt and

nut that were there. They were still attached to the lug, but they had been eaten to about half to a quarter of what they were before. So we finally got that off. We finally went through some old toolboxes and some stuff that he had. We found a bolt and a washer that would work. We found a connector to put back on it. And we got all of that. We got all of that done right before lunch.

We were pushing into, we were about 15 minutes late for lunch and it still wouldn't crank. So I was like, well, damn it, we'll have to address this after lunch. So we eat lunch, we come back out, we're looking at everything and we've got the meter out, we're testing.

It's like, okay, all the conductors, we've got voltage, everything seems to be working. And it just so happens that Tyler, he's sitting there and he happens to, because we had to We had to take the seat off so that we can move some of the plastic shroud around, and it just so happened that he happened to catch a glint of something, and come to find out, he looked at me and just shook his head, and then I looked down, and the socket that connected to the bottom of the key, of the key switch, had pulled loose.

So, of course, every time we tried to crank it, nothing happened. So, we got that connected. I got back on it and boom, it cranks right up. I'm like, holy hell, that's fantastic. So, I get everything put back together.

I get on the lawnmower. I'm cutting. You know, I tried the mulching and I waited specifically till after lunch because I needed the grass to be dry enough that it wouldn't cause me clogging issues up under the deck with the mulching attachment on it, or the mulching shroud, I should say.

Well, a couple of passes, and even as I guess there was still a little bit of moisture on the grass, it was causing me a problem to the point that the belt was actually slipping. So I was like, okay, well, screw this. I'll put the regular shoot on.

So I've been, I'm, I'm cutting for, I don't know, half hour, 45 minutes. And you need to understand that I'm still dealing with the aftermath of these, these trees being cut down. And even though the stumps were ground down to the ground, there are still in certain areas, some fucking roots that for several cuttings after the trees were down, I used

the old blade from last season knowing that it was dull as hell, but I didn't care if it got duller because I was going over these roots. Well, this is either the second or third cutting on a new blade. And so I went over an area that I've been over multiple, multiple times, and apparently something hit just right that it bent the fucking blade. And I did not realize that it had bent the

blade. I knew something wasn't right because when it hit, the lawnmower started like shaking. And so I go down and I make a turn and I'm going to make another pass. But I've noticed that the lawnmower is making this different noise and there's dirt being thrown out everywhere. And so I look behind me and I'm gouging like a trough behind me. And I'm like, what the fuck? And so

I disengaged the blade. I pulled the deck up. I haul ass back to my shop, in front of the shop. I picked the lawnmower up and look at the blade, and it twisted the hell out of one side.

There was no... I mean, maybe if I had the right tools and a torch, I could have heated the blade up and kind of got it twisted back, but chances of me getting it back to the way it was from the factory, probably next to nothing, no chance whatsoever. So I'm thinking, well, shit, I'm about halfway through these yards now. And I really don't want to leave them looking like this while

I wait on a blade to come from Amazon, because this is where I normally buy my blades from. And they run about 28 to 30 bucks. So I called Chris's Moore Clinic and I'm like, hey, do y'all have a blade for this lawnmower. So they look me up and they go and look and say, yeah, man, we got one. So we haul ass over there. Tyler and I get in this truck. We haul ass over there. I give them the old blade. They bring me the new blade and 40 bucks, 40 bucks for that blade. But it got me back

going so that I could actually finish cutting my damn yards. And yeah, that that tells me that I need to keep a spare blade at all times that I'm going to order from Amazon and save somewhere between 10 to 15 bucks, for sure. But that's my lawnmower story from this past Friday. So I thought you might enjoy that, especially if you're someone who has to take care of a decent-sized

yard, whether it's right at an acre or even more, and then the trials and tribulations that you might go through. Because this is not the first time I've had a route fuck me over. Several years ago, back before I sold the place over in Ben Hill County, I was on that 42-inch mower. Now, that deck is the type that takes two blades. So, you got two pulleys. Well, this is probably like,

honestly, I can't remember, but I'm going to say this is probably like maybe the fourth or fifth cutting of the season, not long after I got the lawnmower. It was either the first season that I got the lawnmower or the second season after I got the lawnmower. I cannot remember, but I'm cutting like I normally do. I'm going around this one particular tree and it just so happens that there's

one route that the stars aligned and I didn't bend the blade. I bent the pulley. And so that day I had to do some fucking engineering out of my ass to figure out how to get the blades in that one on the, I think it was the left-hand side, might've been the right-hand side.

It doesn't matter, but I had to figure out how to shim the pulley enough that I could get the blades to level out so that I'm not cutting two uneven paths. So me and lawnmowers, man, you know, I think I must get it from my mom because the number of times that she would actually tear up a lawnmower by running over something that she wasn't supposed to, running into something that she wasn't supposed to. Luckily, I haven't done

that yet. Knock on wood. That's me knocking on my hard-ass skull. But yeah, that was my ordeal Friday. And one of the things that I recognized is having been sober for as long as I have, If I had still been drinking, that entire scenario would have just set my ass on fire.

I would have been so pissed off that I would have just given the fuck up, put the lawnmower up and just started drinking and just forgotten about the day, which then would have made everybody's lives around me probably that much worse later that afternoon and that night. And then I would have waken up Saturday morning thinking, fuck, what an ass I was having to apologize to everybody, but now it was aggravating, but I kept a level head and I just looked at the

next step. What can I do? How can I fix this? And ultimately at the end of the day, it doesn't matter to me as much as it used to because I've had to leave these yards like this before. I'm not going to get bent out of shape or embarrassed over a yard that is only half cut because I am quite confident that I am not the first person in the world that started working on their yards,

cutting their yards and had to stop because something mechanically happened and they couldn't finish and they had to come back like a week later or maybe just a few days later or something like that. So I do somewhat attribute the fact that I have been free from alcohol for 1,215 days today is the reason why I was just able to deal with that stuff.

And I'm able to deal with things a lot easier than I used to be able to. And, you know, you're listening to this and you're dealing with an issue like alcohol abuse or any kind of substance abuse. I hope you can take that to heart and see that, you know, if you can get off of it, get your mind right, your heart right, it definitely will be beneficial for you in your overall general life.

Okay, now this next thing is something that I want to slightly bitch and complain about. So, fast food, specifically Burger King, but this is probably an issue surrounding most fast food places, with the exception of Arby's.

Now, I know you may give me shit about Arby's. I particularly like Arby's. I like the roast beef sandwiches, but I don't necessarily eat Arby's for the roast beef. I know that's kind of oxymoronic, right? But they have a fantastic cheesecake sandwich.

So not cheesecake, cheesesteak. What the hell am I? Damn, I think I want a dessert now. Anyway, they have a cheesesteak that is really, really good. Sunday, I decided that we were going to get Burger King. Now, the reason why is because my wife has been craving Burger King.

She knows that it was going to fuck her over because she has recently, I say recently, like in the last six months, she's been on this journey to identify the foods that make her feel bad. Now, you know, it's not gluten or any of that. This is more of an obscure thing that you really don't see that often, but it's permeated

through pretty much all the foods if you're not careful, and that is some form of corn, Whether it's a cornstarch binder for certain types of food, whether it's some kind of ingredient that you can't fucking pronounce.

But if you do a deep dive, you'll discover that it's derived from corn. I mean, the United States grows a shit ton of corn and corn is the basis of a lot of things in our food supply. Well, she's discovered that when she eats anything with corn, her blood pressure tanks and she just feels really bad.

So we have to craft menus around here now, especially if it's going to be a family oriented sit down menu where we try to minimize or completely eliminate any foods in the meal that are going to have some connection to corn.

But she's been craving Burger King, and she knew that, as I asked her, I said, afterwards, was the juice worth the squeeze? And her answer was yes, even though we had Burger King right at lunch yesterday.

And so then she slept all yesterday afternoon, got up for a few hours. We go to bed around 10 p.m. every night. I'm up at five every morning. She slept until almost a quarter to 11 this morning. So again, I asked her, was the juice worth the squeeze? And she said, yes. She said, it's one of these things

that I had to do to remind myself that as much as I crave this stuff, I can't have it without paying the price. And then she likened it to drinking alcohol. You know how a lot of us who would partake, we knew that the possibility that the next day was just going to be a head-throbbing

experience, a nauseating experience, a lethargic experience. But in the moment, we didn't give a shit. We were having fun. Tomorrow's issues was a problem for future us, right? And so she likened it to that. And so I got that, but that's not what I want to complain about. Here's what I want to complain about. So we bought four hamburgers. Now, I'm not going to stand here and lie to you

and say that they were just single cheeseburgers, anything like that. If you're not familiar with Burger King, of course they have the Whopper, which is what I bought her. She wanted a double Whopper with cheese. So that's already a hefty burger, hefty price. Well, they also have this thing called the Bacon King and it's over $9 just for the burger. Okay. So we wound up with four hamburgers, one Double Whopper, three Bacon Kings with two of them coming just like they are.

But with mine, I added lettuce, tomato, and onion. So I think mine was around $10 or something. I know, it still blows my mind, a $10 hamburger. This is even a combo meal now. Listen to me.

It is not a combo meal. This was just for the damn hamburger. So we had four hamburgers, two large onion rings, two large fries, and then these two specialty sides of the jalapeno poppers and bacon something or another.

All right. The two onion rings were supposed to come with the zesty sauce, one each. But I bought an additional seven. So we were supposed to get nine zesty sauces, 30 cents each for the additional seven, right? We got five.

And the lady at the window, she kept asking me something about sauce. And I told her, I said, well, I bought seven extra, so there should be at least seven in there. Well, we got five. So we should have had a total of nine, right? But we got five.

All right, whatever. We wound up with an extra anyhow that didn't get eaten. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Let me go over this again. Four burgers, two large onion rings, two large fries, two specialty sides, and they charge me for seven zesty sauces, of which I only got five.

$67 in South Central Georgia. $67. Now, my son Tyler did the quick math. We were talking later yesterday afternoon, and he said that works out to be roughly about $17, $18 per person for the meal, except none of us ate supper. That was our one and only meal

yesterday. If you look at it as two meals, then the math looks a little better at roughly around eight-ish or so. Don't chastise me on the math. I'm not trying to be 100% accurate. I'm giving you estimates and roundabouts. So it worked out to be roughly about $8 a person because we essentially had two meals because if we'd only had the one meal and then we ate again, you get what I'm saying.

So anyway, $67. When I was putting the order in, because this was the first time we did the mobile ordering, online ordering for Burger King. I've done it for Arby's multiple times. The first time I did it for Burger King. And I got to say, it worked really well.

I don't understand what it is with these people at the window, though, because they act like you did something wrong because you ordered online.

A service that is provided by the company to streamline things and honestly to make us want to buy more often and probably more because we're sitting here in the comforter of our own homes on our phones or on our computers or whatever, really scoping out what it is that we want to try.

Because I'm one of these people that I cannot stand to be in line at a restaurant to order, and especially if it's a restaurant that I've never been in, and I have no idea exactly what is good and what isn't, and I'm having to look at a menu board and blah, you know, I don't need that kind of pressure in my life.

But they always act like it's an inconvenience that you ordered online. I don't understand it. But as I was putting the order in, I made the comment to my son. I said, pizza is cheaper. And you may be thinking, well, where the hell are you buying pizza that is cheaper? And I know I'm going to get some shit for this, and I don't care.

But we primarily eat Domino's. And if you're a Domino's hater, you can be a Domino's hater. I don't care. I like Domino's pizza, especially their pepperoni pizzas. They're fucking fantastic. The only other pizza that I've ever had that I would deem somewhat better is in the OG days of Pizza Hut.

Have you ever had a Priazzo? If you haven't, you don't know what it is, look up Pizza Hut and Priazzo. That thing was fucking phenomenal. But Domino's, and we happen to be in an area, we live far enough out that they won't deliver to us. So we have to go pick it up. And that is perfect because they have their $7.99 one topping or three topping or whatever it is special.

It's not actually a special, it's just a common thing. And so we wind up buying four or five pizzas that last easily three days in this house. And it normally doesn't cost me over 55 or 60 bucks. And so that's the reason why whenever I put this order in and it wound up to be around $67 for four hamburgers, two large onion rings, two large fries, and two specialty sides with

not enough zesties that I paid for. It's hard to beat the economics of pizza. It just is difficult to do, but that's my fast food story. That's my story of trying to get my yards cut and all of the ups and downs of dealing with my lawnmower. Anyway, with that, I'm going to let you go because I know you're probably busy and you got other shit to do besides listening to me just jammer on about any and everything going on in my life.

But I do appreciate you. I appreciate you taking the time to listen. Thank you for taking the time to subscribe. And I also want to make mention of the fact that this podcast has been being published on my own platform that I developed through Claude Code.

It's called Podscope. You can look at it at podscope.cc if you ever want to clone it and build your own or whatever. But it's on the platform. It's technically located at tiftamediaworks.com, but you can get to it by going to bookofdonovan.com. But I recently added the ability for the system to have newsletters.

So if you go to bookofdonovan.com, there will be a widget right there where you can sign up. And, you know, sometimes I'll just send shit out because I don't feel like recording an episode or I'll record the episode and then I'll send out a quick little blurb. Hey, I got a new episode in case, you know, something's happening with your podcast app or what have you.

But anyway, enough of the housekeeping on that. We're right here at the end of this episode. Again, thank you for your time. I hope you and yours are doing well. And whenever the mood strikes me, I'll put out another episode. But until then, take care of yourself.