Sometimes even at the ripe old age of 29 41 I amaze myself with my own stupidity.  This time it involves our lawnmower.  For most of this year, well the last two years if you must know, the mower has been running a little rough, with the engine sounding like it was throttling up and down in a fairly random way.  Me, not being on the mechanically inclined side, figured it was my 4-year old mower showing its age.  Finally last week it stopped running altogether and when I tried to restart it I couldn’t get it to turn over.  I looked at it a little while, fiddled with this and that, and repeatedly pulled the rope harder and harder to try and start it.  No dice.

After a great deal of pondering and some time looking at the stupid thing I realized that it has a spark plug. "Hmmm," I thought, "I wonder if a new spark plug would help?"  So I put the mower away and decided to weed whack the remainder of the long grass around our patio (roughly 1/8 acre).  Two hours later I was done and sick of thinking about my yard so I showered up and decided to procrastinate re. the mower.

Later in the week I was running errands and decided to find a spark plug.  I was nowhere near an auto parts store, but I was near Wal-Mart so I held my nose and went in.  Thus I was confronted with the fact that there are several sizes of spark plugs for small engines to choose from, and I didn’t have a clue which would fit my mower.  So I took an educated guess and spent the $2.50 for a plug, figuring that if I was right all was good and if I was wrong I could afford to have a spare spark plug lying around and go buy another one at the auto parts joint.

Lucky for me I already had an appropriately sized wrench for removal of the mower’s spark plug thanks to my shower repair job two weeks ago, so I was able to remove the old spark plug in a jiffy and compare it to my new one.  Lo’ and behold they matched!  Better lucky than good I guess.  On went the new one and then a I gave a sample pull to the starter rope.

Eureka!  The mower purred and roared like a teenage boy on Viagra.  It hadn’t sounded so good in at least two years, and at first I was overjoyed.  Then it occurred to me: I’ve probably wasted gallons of gas over the last two years because I didn’t think to replace one $2.50 spark plug!  And how many times had the mower stalled when confronted with tall or thick grass?  Now it was cutting through those patches like a hot knife through butter.  "Jeez, I’m an idiot," I thought.  Okay, I’m paraphrasing my thoughts.  They were actually much saltier.

I’m thinking I need to write a manual for morons like me; "A True Idiot’s Guide Suburban Living."