Tuesday, September 4, 2012

September 4 – “Small engines and fried fish”


I had a chance to use my brand new weedeater yesterday.  With our kids coming over for the family fish fry, we wanted to get the yard looking nice.  Hey, we gotta show it off to somebody.  I started out by mowing the lawn.  Sounds so easy, so simple to just say that.   “Mowing the lawn.”  How hard could it be?  Make sure there is plenty of gas.  Push the little red button to prime it.  Pull the starter rope.  And go.  Our lawn mower is fairly new as well.  We got it at the start of the season, so one would expect it to operate perfectly.  Well, not so much.  It has taken to sputtering and complaining constantly.  But for the first time since we got it a few weeks ago, it decided to stop altogether.  It ran out of gas, so I refilled it, but then it absolutely refused to restart at all.  I tried all the appropriate tricks of the trade, but it was quite stubborn.  I finally pulled our old lawn mower out of the garage and gave it a chance.  Ran like a dream.  Why was it we got that new one, anyway?  I finished out the yard and switched locations for the mowers.  The one who works get privileged status.  Gotta be some kind of sermon illustration in there somewhere.

The new weedeater worked like a charm, though.  It has two pieces of string doing the cutting instead of the one on our old version.  It also has the safety guard.  Ours hasn’t had that in a year or two.  My ankles were greatly appreciative of the respite.  And the automatic advance system actually worked.  I didn’t have to stop every so often and manually pull more string out.  Amazing how much faster it went.  There was one problem, though.  After I started sweating a lot, the trigger started giving me a little shock every time I pushed it.  I don’t think that was supposed to happen.  It wasn’t all that bad, actually.  Just annoying.  I finally put a glove on so I could get done. 

The fish fry was a huge success.  Lots of specks and whiting.  Potato salad.  Corn on the cob.  Green salad.  Oh, and shrimp, too.  Fried two different ways – corn meal (the fish fry premixed stuff) and batter (more of a home recipe).  Kel made sure to take a picture of the pile of fish and send it to Josh so he could “enjoy it” along with us.  Zakary wanted me to save him some for when they come down.  Think I’ll just catch some more so it will be fresh for you, Zak.  Wonder what the Gulf looks like today …

Psalms 27:1 says, “The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid?”

Father, thank you for my family.  Nothing quite like spending time with them.  Amen.

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