Always Busy in Texas

It doesn’t seem to matter what I might think I will achieve when I come to Texas, I always seem to get distracted. Of course the distractions are always fun and worth it, you only live once. For example my in-Laws have 24 acres of land for their horses and much of this land needs to be regularly manicured. Whenever I come into town I like to spend some time helping out with this particular chore. Normally Joe will do this push mowing while I use the ride-on. It typically takes Joe and I about 2 hours to do all of it including the edging. Well, like all good males, Joe is always inspired by bigger, better and faster ways to mow lawn and true to this, Joe bought a zero turn mower. See below for a picture. Now I have been waiting for two months to have a go and finally my time came.

Now you drive this thing by pushing both levers forward and you steer by pulling one lever back while the other is forward, just like a tank. Now steering is a little counter intuitive for about the first hour but I soon found myself able to very competently maneuver my way around the yard with a satisfactory degree of agility. I think my life has been changed. I mowed the entire area around the house on my own in less time than it takes via the other method. To add sugar on top, I was comfortable and was able to catch some rays while working.

Now, I am fairly sun conscious in my older age and sprayed a healthy dose of sunscreen on. I like a brand called Bullfrog which goes on with no greasy after feel and it really works. So well they for two hours of shirt off mowing action, I have no sunburn, in fact, you can barely tell I even got any sun. I did however get a healthy dose of heat stroke and spent the next 3 days trying to keep cool and drinking fluids. I have to laugh, I mean I come from the hottest, driest continent in the world and I live in “flaming hot” Florida and here I am boasting how its really not that hot in Texas and I get heat stroke. LOL. Serves me right.

What else, well Jenee and I went out to dinner with a few friends to a fun Japanese restaurant where we had our own chef cook our food in front of us. We even tried to catch our food in our mouths as our chef launched it at us. That was a lot of fun. After dinner we visited David’s parents home specifically so I could see his fathers trains. As I walked up the stairs to the train room I didn’t know what to expect. When his dad turned on the lights I know my jaw dropped and I was apparently speechless for a good minute or two. Now I wont write too much about it here, but all I can say is WOW. David’s father has meticulously built an engineers dream set. With two stock yards, 6 main lines, working bridges, over-passes, tunnels and more, this is going to be even more amazing when its done and the most impressive thing is that his dad has been collecting these 0-guage trains since he was 10. So cool, I have been invited to come back and take some photos so hopefully he will let me share some here.