Dethatching Desmatching

Today, I marked the locations of over 100 sprinkler heads (which took me like two hours to do), and then I blazed up My Precious with my new dethatching trailer. It was the first time I got to use the dethatcher. Boy howdy did that thing dethatch. It dethatched the living sheeit out of the lawn. MaxieC said it best when he said, "Hey Da, your trailer is changing the color of the lawn from green to brown!"

It was a lot of fun.

I ran the blades while dethatching, and that generated a huge cloud of dust that blanketed the neighborhood. But it didn't really annoy anybody because I'm not the normally-annoying neighbor.

We've also started to prepare for our road trip in earnest. On Saturday, we bought a new cooler, cuz our coolers have gradually lost their ability to keep the lids shut. After much running around, we settled on a Coleman Powerchill thermoelectric cooler. The big kicker with this guy is that we can use it as a mini-fridge out on the deck when we're not traveling. Plus, there's a Coleman factory outlet store nearby in Loverlyland, and they have really good prices. The minivan has a cigarette lighter power outlet way back just inside the tailgate, and that'll be perfect for the cooler.

The Mrs. dry-fit most of the luggage into the minivan. We had to change up our plans a bit with respect to the dog crate because the door wasn't wide enough to accept the rat's cage. So the dog crate is going unassembled. We've decided to not tell any of the hotels that we're bringing a rat along, and instead just fess up to the dog. No one will discover the rat, as they'll be afraid to enter the room with a vicious dog in there.

I'll try to post some "on the road" updates for my adoring fans. I'll be bringing the laptop along, so this will all depend upon if any of the dumps at which we are staying have internet.