Relative Something

One moment of losing focus on the task at hand can have unwelcome consequences. I took a blow to the leg when I least expected it; a smack hard enough to bruise bone and break the skin. No, it wasn’t while using the chainsaw, nor the string trimmer or hedge trimmer. I stubbed my leg against one of the rocks along the front of our fireplace.

Is this why running in the house is frowned upon? I was fully engaged in Asher’s favorite indoor pastime of pursuing him and the toy in his mouth as he ran laps around the spiral staircase and the furniture in the living room.

The game came to a screaming halt, with the screaming coming from me as I wailed over the sudden crippling pain. Cyndie worried I’d seriously injured myself, not having a clue what had caused my outburst. I worried I might never walk again.

Okay, that is an unnecessary exaggeration. Some quick first-aid in the form of an ice pack from Cyndie and elevation had me back functional in about 30 minutes. The extent of the wound serves as an indication of just how fast I can get moving on two feet, so I see it as a badge of my athletic prowess. Still, I wasn’t fast enough to catch Asher.

The bruised leg didn’t prevent me from making some impressive progress on pushing the abilities of my Greenworks riding mower to mow along the fence line from inside the pastures.

It’s asking a lot from the machine to cut such tall, thick grass where the surface is dramatically uneven with divots from horse hooves, piles of dirt from gophers, and some unavoidable piles of manure. The effort is compounded by the occasional plugging of the mower exit chute and the fully understandable interruption of the PTO when a blade motor over-temp sensor is tripped.

I learned from a Greenworks support technician that a blade of grass can get up inside a gap along the spindle to cause the error that trips the sensor and shuts down the blades. The only time that has been a problem for me is when I try mowing where the grass is too much for this mower, so it’s not the machine’s fault.

Since I now know how to solve the issue, it’s not that concerning, and I find myself more willing to push the machine beyond its limits. I stumbled a little bit the first time it happened yesterday because I was getting a second error code that had me walking back to the shop to charge a battery in hopes of limping the mower back to the garage. Reviewing the manual for error codes alerted me that I hadn’t reset the PTO button to “off” after the blade motor sensor tripped.

The mower won’t start with the PTO in the “on” position. D’oh!

As soon as I resolved all the issues, I was back in business. It worked so well the rest of the way, I continued to mow pasture away from the fence. The area around the round pen is a hassle to navigate with the diesel tractor and brush hog, so the more I can do with the little riding mower, the better.

It’s as impressive as heck that the Greenworks zero-turn riding mower is up to handling everything I push it to do.

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