My Inner Lumberjack, SleepIQ and Does Hollywood Think the Bible Is a True Story?

You probably wouldn’t assume it by looking at me but I have a streak of lumberjack in me. It’s not just the flannel and chamois shirts I favor once the air becomes nippy.

My constant gardener, aka Gilda, loves her compost and mulch, resulting in many an afternoon spent by yours truly collecting fallen leaves to be pulverized in my Sears Craftsman Leafwacker Plus. One day last week after chopping up 15 bags of leaves I filled another 18 black, 40-gallon Hefty bags with the discards from maple and oak trees. I shredded those leaves this afternoon. 

A few years ago I bought the Leafwacker from a Craig’s List poster in New Jersey for $25 and have enjoyed the annual autumn ritual of mulching leaves. It’s a lot less laborious than my two decades-ago lumberjack toil of collecting, chainsawing, chopping and stacking tree limbs culled from the roadside for our wood-burning stove.

Anyway, there’s a back-to-nature type of pleasure I get from this exercise, which almost got stopped in its tracks this year. Shortly after starting last week, the Leafwacker ground to a halt. I thought it might have shorted out on the foil wrapper of a Twix bar that had infiltrated the leaves. I took the machine to the Sears repair shop. They said it would cost some $125 with no guarantee they could fix it. 

I passed on that “reassuring” estimate and turned to Google. Sure enough, there were several posts about sudden stoppages of a Leafwacker, including one suggestion to hit the reset button on the bottom of the inverted machine. Who knew there was a reset button? Again sure enough, the Leafwacker sprung back to life. A short while later the mulcher stopped again in mid-stream but this time I knew what to do. Hooray for technology. 

Sleep Tight: The good people who sold us our Sleep Number bed called over the weekend to ask how we’ve been slumbering and to suggest a technology add-on. With SleepIQ, we’d be able to monitor things like how many times we got up in the middle of the night, how often we tossed and turned, our heart rate and breathing rate, and how our diet affected our sleep. All this for $499.

I respectfully declined, though I would have liked to find out how SleepIQ distinguishes normal tossing and turning from the bodily movements of two people making love. 

Here’s another question I’d like the answer to—when Gilda and I recently went to the movies, we saw a preview for "50 to 1," what was said to be “based on the true story of horse racing legend Mine That Bird.”

Okay, lots of pictures these days originate from “true” stories. The next preview was for “Exodus: Gods and Kings.” It did not say the movie was based on a true story. I’m guessing the producers did not want to take sides on whether the Bible was fact- or myth-based, but I’d like to know their reasoning. 

Spoiler Alert: The movie we saw was “Gone Girl,” which contained one of the best puns I’ve heard recently. It concerned Amy Dunne who masquerades her own disappearance and possible murder. In describing missing person Amy, a TV personality said she “forged a successful career in journalism.” As the British say, brilliant.

Calling Paul Bunyan

Naturally, it didn’t work as advertised.

What I thought would be a relatively simple chore of mulching leaves for Gilda’s compost pile turned out to be anything but. I made some progress but the machine turned fickle on me—after two hours, instead of vacuuming, it wound up blowing leaves.

Every so often I fancy myself as an outdoorsman. In my youthful days as a homeowner, I succumbed to envy and embarked on a wood-burning stove regimen like my neighbor Peter. It required a chain saw (and the mental felicity and physical dexterity not to maim or dismember myself). I’d ride around with the chain saw in the back of my ‘73 Vega hatchback, looking more at the side of the road for downed tree limbs than at the traffic around me. I’d pull over to the shoulder, whip out the chain saw and pile the cuttings into the back of the Vega. Back home I’d chop the haul into usable pieces for our wood-burning stove.

That was more than 20 years ago. The chain saw has long since been discarded. Now I confine my Paul Bunyan moments to the occasional manual trimming of a low-hanging limb. I leave the yard work to the gardeners and to Gilda. Reluctantly, I help out by retrieving free mulch and compost from the town public works site for her vegetable and flower garden.

Ever the gardening entrepreneur, Gilda recently decided she wanted to make her own compost from our harvest of fall leaves. She had me build a 3’x4’ netted area on our side yard for numerous garbage can loads of leaves. Our son Dan brought down his blower/mulcher a few weeks ago, but she didn’t think it had enough power. My brother offered his no longer used Black & Decker Vac ’n’ Mulch Blower/Vac which he assured us was more powerful. This past weekend I liberated it from his garage and brought it home. Ever the compliant husband (ed note: to be read sarcastically), I volunteered to mulch away Monday morning, not realizing it would be c-o-l-d outside with the season’s first snow flurries.

It took about 15 minutes to set the machine up properly. The vacuum tube in front of the mulching blade repeatedly got clogged, requiring me to stop and start again and again. The exhaust hose kept falling off the housing. I had to tape it down. The final straw was the machine’s inexplicable desire to be a blower, not a vacuum/mulcher. I gave up, at least for today.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll try again.