Posts Tagged ‘bruise’
Pushing Abilities
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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Breaking Point
How far can things stretch before they break? The one sure way to find out is when the “thing” in question actually breaks. I’m inclined toward not discovering this in most cases, and as a result, try not to stretch the limits of unknowns that could involve harm.
It’s weird to watch the number of people who are choosing to march together in protest over having businesses forced to shut down and people commanded to shelter in place. Have they honestly reached their breaking point? Something tells me that would be a poor use of the descriptor.
For the most part, I avoided breaking anything I didn’t intend to break yesterday while pretending to be a lumberjack, although I did suffer a significant contusion just above my right knee. Wood is really heavy. Really, really heavy. A tree that didn’t seem all that large tipped precisely in the direction I intended, but at the last moment when the upper branches reached the ground, it caused the trunk to swiftly roll back toward me and smack my leg.
I was able to cut the smaller trees straight through with a single swipe, such that I am right beside them as they respond. Sometimes they lay down on their own, other times the trunk shifts and lands upright on the ground with the high branches held up by surrounding limbs. The tree that got me was just a bit bigger, so I smartly cut a notch on the front side and made a slot on the backside for the hinge technique of felling trees.
There was one important next step I forgot where I’m to swiftly move away when the tree starts to tip.
I stretched the safety rules, but luckily this time, not to a breaking point.
Out of the many trees toppled yesterday, I only had one get hung up on a nearby three so solidly that we couldn’t pull it down. I cut the leaning trunk to separate the upper portion from the base but that didn’t do anything about the limb that was tightly nestled deep in the “Y” of the standing tree.
Using the skills I learned from my brother, Elliott, I tossed a weighted line into the branches in order to pull a rope through. Cyndie and I took turns trying to pull in every direction, but nothing was going to change that perfect catch-point of the two trees. I headed back to the shop for the pole-chainsaw.
It wasn’t long enough to reach the critical point from the ground, but I was able to trim and bring down the bulk of the tree.
I was reaching the breaking point of my tolerance for dealing with that blasted tangle of branches and called it a day.
There is a terrace wall construction project that is in need of attention.
Counting my blessings that sheltering at home for us does not mean staying inside an apartment or our house…
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Relative Something 